Abstract
Wells turbine is one of self-rectifying turbines which is utilized to extract mechanical shaft power in wave energy converters with oscillating water column (OWC). This paper presents the investigation on the performance of Wells turbine with the NACA0020 blade profile by means of numerical method using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The investigation is carried out on the numerical model with uniform tip clearance of 0.5 mm and l mm under steady flow condition. As a result, it was shown that the numerical method has been able to provide the reasonable result of the turbine performance qualitatively and quantitatively. It was also shown clearly that the effect of tip clearance influences significantly on the turbine performance.
