TY - JOUR TI - Unsteady effects of a winglet on the performance of horizontal-axis tidal turbine AU - Zhang, D AU - Liu, D AU - Liu, X AU - Xu, Y AU - Wang, Y AU - Bi, R AU - Qian, P T2 - Renewable Energy AB - A tip winglet can reduce the induced drag and the load fluctuation of a blade, considerably improving the hydrodynamic performance of a tidal turbine. Up to now, there are fewer studies on the unsteady effects of winglets, which limits the application of this design scheme. In this paper, a tidal turbine model is established based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and verified by a flume experiment. Then, unsteady effects on the turbine blade are analyzed considering different winglet lengths and cant angles. According to the study, the blade performance is optimal when the winglet cant angle is 45°, with about 11% efficiency improvement and about 8% increase in axial force; as the winglet length increases, the performance tends to further improve. In addition, this study demonstrates that the reason why a winglet can reduce blade load fluctuations is that the winglet takes the tip vortex generation position away from the blade rotation plane, instead of reducing the tip vortex intensity. DA - 2024/05// PY - 2024 VL - 225 UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148124003999 DO - 10.1016/j.renene.2024.120334 LA - English KW - Current KW - Tidal KW - Modeling KW - Performance ER -