Investigating the effect of erosion induced surface roughness on tidal turbine blade performance : part 1

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Habibi, Payvand and Algaddaime, Talal F. and Lotfian, Saeid and Stack, Margaret M. (2024) Investigating the effect of erosion induced surface roughness on tidal turbine blade performance : part 1. In: Tenth International Conference on Engineering Failure Analysis, 2024-07-07 - 2024-07-10.

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Abstract

The renewable energy sector develops the most outstanding engineering ideas and brings them into action to mitigate further environmental damage. Yet, some failure mechanisms concerning causes, effects, and solutions must be studied. This study explores erosion as one of the most problematic phenomena in tidal turbine blades. This failure first targets structural integrity on the blade surface and gradually propagates to the substrate. Erosion can trigger failures like fatigue, corrosion, and ageing. These failures can also make erosion worse. Eventually, this wear leads to tribological breakdown and hydrodynamic failure even before the design lifetime ends. Erosion starts with pits on the blade's leading edge and gradually grows, penetrates and spreads all over the blade. Before the complete delamination, the turbine keeps serving despite a considerable reduction in its performance due to a rough blade surface. The relation between erosion-induced roughness and performance reduction is still unknown. Apart from a lack of industrial cases, the existent prototypes have been commissioned quite recently. In addition, the exclusive effect of erosion on the turbine performance cannot be evaluated from a real turbine because of the impact of other failures. Therefore, a parametric study has been carried out to investigate the influence of erosion on the tidal turbine blade surface. Implementing a range of roughness heights from 0.01mm to 1.2 mm on the blade section at Reynold’s number of 1.6e+6, the effect of early-stage erosion severity on the hydrofoil efficiency is investigated. The effect of erosion on the fibre-reinforced polymer surface for different impact angles and periods has also been experimentally studied. This was through erosion tests on glass fibre-reinforced polymer plates (FR4) in a sand-salt-water erosion rig. As the results show, the severity of erosion increases over time. Furthermore, erosion increases with impingement angles up to 60 degrees and then decreases at 90 degrees. These outcomes will lead us to the next step, investigating the impact of erosion on the efficiency of the tidal turbine blade. This paper is part one of a two-part study. In part II, the influence of erosion-induced roughness distribution on the hydrofoil efficiency is numerically studied.

ORCID iDs

Habibi, Payvand, Algaddaime, Talal F., Lotfian, Saeid ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8542-933X and Stack, Margaret M. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6535-6014;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)