Abstract
Despite the great advances achieved in the last decade, tidal stream energy technology still has to advance some steps before becoming competitive in the energy market. One of the challenges to face is the understanding and prediction of currents. Although harmonic analysis has provided good results in the estimation of averaged current velocity and direction, insitu measurements show a notable importance of shorter period flow fluctuations, such as those generated by turbulence conditions of the flow (<1 minute). The present paper provides a new approach for the estimation of turbulence related velocity direction fluctuations based on data measured by two ADV and two ADCP at four different locations in Goto Islands, Japan. Dividing data in short period groups (3 minutes for ADV data, 5 minutes for ADCP data), results show a lineal correlation between different percentiles of opening angle and turbulence intensity. Due to the capability of numerical models to estimate this second parameter, this approach opens the door to prediction of high frequency fluctuations on flow direction