Abstract
This paper presents a study on Vane Tidal Turbine (VTT) focusing on analysis of two types of blade arrangement originated from the previous studies where the original design was examined and performance-tested for different numbers of blades (six, eight and twelve). Compared to conventional tidal turbines, VTT has several special features and potential advantages which have been being thoroughly developed. The purpose of this study is to analyze VTT's capability of extracting and converting the hydrokinetic energy of tidal currents into electricity at given arrangement of blades (single and double rows, six and twelve blades) using CFD. From the calculation results, the six-blade single row turbine shows the best performance, in which the highest power and torque coefficients reach up to about 34 % and 36 %, respectively, at TSR=0.94. However, despite of lower power coefficient, by adding more blades, the torque's extraction of twelve-blade turbine, especially the double row type, is less fluctuate than that of the six-blade setups.