Performance Improvement of Hydrofoil with Biological Characteristics: Tail Fin of a Whale

Abstract

In order to improve the hydrodynamic performance of hydrofoils, this paper shows excellent hydrodynamic performance according to the flapping motion of fish through the tail fin. The Naca66 hydrofoil is used as the original hydrofoil and the trailing edge flap configuration is added. Ansys-fluent is used to analyze the relationship between the structural parameters (length and angle) of the flap and the hydrodynamic performance of the hydrofoil, the reliability of CFD numerical simulation is verified by PIV experiment. It is found that the hydrofoil, with clockwise rotating short flap, can significantly improve the hydrodynamic performance of a hydrofoil at a small angle of attack; at a high angle of attack, the hydrofoil with counterclockwise flap can increase the critical stall angle and slightly improve the hydrodynamic performance of the hydrofoil. The hydrodynamic performance of hydrofoil with rotatable short flaps reported in this paper can provide valuable information for the design and optimization of this kind of hydrofoil.

Models for a hydropower plant: a review

“…have been performed widely in the past (Benavides-Morán, Rodríguez-Jaime and Laín, 2022; Niebuhr et al, 2022;Peng et al, 2022).They conclude that the power coefficient is affected by presence of free surface. Similarly, authors in (Lopez Mejia et al, 2021) propose practise guidelines for CFD simulations in turbines studying the performance standard of vertical axis and horizontal axis turbines and those in (Xiong, Deng and Chen, 2021) study about flapping motion in tail edge which is found to present a better stability for turbine. Although it is said that high level highorder models like CFD are not practical in modelling the whole hydropower, a few low order models are studied for the purposes like fault occurrence, estimation of number and geometry of components for hydropower, etc in practice (Li et al, 2021;YoosefDoost and Lubitz, 2021;Saeed et al, 2022).…”

Special Issue on “CFD Modelling and Simulation of Water Turbines”

“…Modelling and simulation of horizontal-and vertical-axis turbines for hydrokinetic applications [10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Xiong et al [13] investigated the hydrodynamic performance enhancement of a hydrofoil when a flapping motion is added to its trailing edge. Such an idea was bio-inspired by examining the flapping movement of a whale tail fin.…”