Multi-point design optimization of hydrofoil for marine current turbine

The comprehensive performance of the marine current turbine is an important issue in the ocean energy development. Its key is the performance of the hydrofoil, which is used to form the turbine blade. A multi-point optimization method of the hydrofoil is proposed in this paper. In this method, the Bezier curve is used to parameterize the hydrofoil. The geometrical parameters are used as variables while the lift-drag ratio and the cavitation performance of the hydrofoil are used as the objective functions. The NSGA-II algorithm is chosen as the optimization algorithm. In order to resolve the difficulty of this high-dimensional multi-objective optimization problem, the conception of the distance metric in the metric space is introduced to unify the lift-drag ratio and the cavitation performance under different working conditions. And then, the above optimization method is applied in the NACA63-815 hydrofoil's optimal design under three typical conditions. Finally, the results from the performance comparison of the original and optimized hydrofoils obtained by using the CFD simulation are analyzed in detail. It is indicated that the optimized hydrofoils enjoy a better hydrodynamic performance than the original ones under the three conditions. The feasibility and the theoretical validity of this optimization method are confirmed by the results.