Turbine Design and Operation

Marine Current Turbine Wakefield Modeling

Led by James VanZwieten, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus: Boca Raton
Affiliated Department: Civil, Environmental, and Geomatics Engineering

PROJECT

Daniel Huang worked with Dr. James VanZwieten and his team to model the wakefield within a marine current turbine array. Marine current turbines (MCTs) are currently being developed to harness the vast reserves of energy present in rivers, coastal tides, and ocean currents. To scale energy production for more significant contributions towards renewable energy goals, MCTs should be deployed in farm arrays, like the wind turbine farms scattered across the land. During the 10 weeks of the REU program, methodologies for calculating wakefields were complied, including both wind and water turbine analytical modeling of mean wake velocities into MATLAB functions. This allows for easy comparison of the current state-of-the-art algorithms and can be used for turbine array positioning optimization problems or power predictions. As development of singular MCT’s progress, these contributions will hopefully have a positive impact on the future of MCT array planning and implementation.

Click here to watch the student presentation.

HBOI ocean fish