Tidal Stream Generator

This is one of my final year project at school, and It has been 6 months since I worked on this project. Nearly 600 hours have been spent on developing this turbine. A lot of challenges still waiting, but I enjoy it.

A little bit about this project:

...the purpose of this project is to design and build a tidal generation to promote public awareness of renewable energy opportunities in the Christchurch area...

...at this scale of this project, the collected electricity from the tidal generator will be used to power up an outdoor advertising display system, which advertises for Ara Institute of Canterbury and shows an amount of power generated from the turbine.

Tidal energy is not new, but it is still a big challenge for most tidal projects because tidal currents are not usually high. Therefore, it is very difficult for extract the energy out of the water and turn it to useful electricity.

Same with this project, I have to develop a turbine that can work with a very low current, about 0.2 - 0.5 m/s, which is a very big challenge. Also, problems are not only stop there, the turbine should not harm to the fish and any species around the installed area. In addition, the turbine also has to function well in a environment that has a lot of seaweed and debris...

I would prefer to not discuss in more detail about this project in this pages, but you can contact me if you are interest in this project and want to know more.

There are no any turbine that are available in the market, so a new turbine has been developed.

CFD analysis has been used to find the optimal design. Some analysis have been done on the Savonius were shown below.