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Tidal current turbine is the core equipment to convert the tidal current energy. In this paper, the performance of the designed tidal current turbine is tested in the laboratory, then the impeller is used to conduct an experiment on the desalination of sea water. The sea test of the novel equipment has been done in BoHai Sea. The experimental results indicate that the efficiency of the newly developed turbine could reach up to 47.6%; the corresponding tip speed ratio is from 3.5 to 6. Under the condition of big yaw angle, the turbine could still remain high working efficiency. When the tidal current velocity exceeds 1.0 m/s, the pressure may increase to 3.5 Mpa, and under this condition, sea water can be desalinated through reverse osmic membrane. The electrical conductivity of desalinated water is around 540 μS/cm. For the experiment on hydrodynamic performance, the self-starting flow velocity of the turbine is 0.745 m/s, the staring torque is 1 Nm while about 0.97-1.0 m/s self-starting flow velocity and around 10-15 Nm starting torque for the experiment on desalination of sea water. It is believed a good attempt by using tidal current turbine in the desalination of sea water, providing the practice basis on expanding the utilization of ocean energy.

In this paper, numerical and experimental investigations are presented on the hydrodynamic performance of a horizontal tidal current turbine (TCT) designed and made by our Dalian University of Technology (DUT) research group. Thus, it is given the acronym: DUTTCT. An open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver, called pimpledymfoam, is employed to perform numerical simulations for design analysis, while experimental tests are conducted in a DUT towing tank. The important factors, including self-starting velocity, tip speed ratio (TSR), and yaw angle, which play important roles in the turbine output power, are studied in the investigations. Results obtained show that the maximum power efficiency of the newly developed turbine (DUTTCT) could reach up to 47.6%, and all its power efficiency is over 40% in the TSR range from 3.5 to 6; the self-starting velocity of DUTTCT is about 0.745 m/s; and the yaw angle has negligible influence on its efficiency as it is less than 10 deg.

A novel procedure for calculating the dynamic response of elastic solid structures is presented. The ultimate aim of this study is to develop a consistent set of finite volume (FV) methods on unstructured meshes for the analysis of dynamic fluidstructure interaction (FSI). This paper describes a two-dimensional (2D) FV cell-vertex based method for dynamic solid mechanics. A novel matrix-free implicit scheme was developed using the Newmark method and dual time step algorithm and the model is validated with a 2D cantilever test case as well as a 2D plate one.