Investigation of blade-mast fluid-structure interaction of a tidal turbine

In this article, we investigate the movement and vibrations of a blade due to the presence of the mast. When the blade passes in front of the mast, a sudden pressure spike induces vibrations in the blade. To study the influence of stiffness, two different structures were studied. We present our numerical schemes concerning the resolution of the flow, the behavior of the structure and the coupling of the two systems. Then, we validate two methods against an experiment (Bahaj et al., 2007). In a third section, we present cases of fluid-structure interaction. Several structures are setup by modifying the stiffness of the material. Their steady open-water (without a mast) behaviors are compared. And finally, two dynamic fluid-structure computations are performed to compare the behavior of an elastic blade passing next to a mast. For all the cases, we use K-FSI developed by K-Epsilon to solve the fluid-structure interaction (FSI).