View article

The status of marine current tidal energy technology is currently in the research and development phase, with a few deployments and tests of prototypes under-way in some countries. There is a huge pressure for tidal farms to be of Gigawatt scale in order to have a real, economically viable impact on renewable energy utilization targets outlined for 2020. A route to achieving this is the large scale energy farm philosophy, similar to wind farms, based on very large numbers of unit current tidal stream devices. However, this emerging technology development raises different research questions which lead to further problems in the practical implementation of tidal stream devices. Thus, the aim of this study was:(i) to develop a new, computationally cheap computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based model of the Momentum-Reversal-Lift (MRL) tidal turbine, and (ii) to perform a detailed calculations of the flow field of single …