| Abstract | Rivers have good potential to contribute to the renewable future of Canada, and river energy converters (REC) typically need to be installed in an array formation or farm layout to maximize their cost efficiency. Optimizing the arrangement of such formations plays a vital role in achieving the array’s maximum effectiveness. In order to analyze the performance of the turbines, a high-definition numerical simulation with fine computational grid gives the most accurate predictions on the performance of a REC array. The Laboratoire de Mécanique des Fluide Numérique (LMFN) of Laval University developed, in collaboration with the National Resources Canada (NRCan), a model approach called the effective performance turbine model (EPTM) that accurately predicts the wake recovery of turbines in an array formation (Bourget in Development and assessment of a modeling method for hydrokinetic turbines operating in arrays, 2018, [1]). However, the computational demand of EPTM inhibits its implementation within a river hydrodynamic model at large scale. Herein, a method is developed to implement EPTM results within TELEMAC-3D, which can be used to predict the drag of a turbine array within a river at reasonable computational cost. To develop the method, the drag coefficients predicted by EPTM are translated to a TELEMAC-3D grid. Inverse distance weighting (IDW) method is employed to ensure smoothly distributed drag coefficients within TELEMAC-3D. Sensitivity analysis was performed to understand the effects of diffusion coefficients in turbulence and their influences on the accuracy of the results. This paper presents the implementation of the EPTM in TELEMAC-3D with simulation examples. |
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