SPOTLIGHT ON WESTERN FRANCE
FEATURE SPONSOR
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN TURBINE DESIGN
Thanks to collaboration with Sabella since 2010, Meca offers responsive solutions to joint hydrodynamic and composite design for manufacturing
FROM SEQUENTIAL DESIGN LOOPS The traditional approach to rotor design is to divide the development in a sequence of subtasks. Fluid dynamics analysis leads to profile definition, which is an input to composite and assembly design, itself providing requirements for manufacturing. Experience has shown that such workflow is either suboptimal or time consuming. At the end, alternative constructions are often considered in order to reduce production costs, but they can only be retained through complete design loops.
TO A PARALLEL WORKFLOW Meca considers that a design process is more than just a long chain of
26
www.wavetidalenergynetwork.co.uk
dependent tasks and propose to explore hydrodynamics, mechanical and manufacturing issues as a whole and in an almost synchronous manner. Of course, this can only be conducted as such by enhancing exchanges between physic fields. For these reasons, they have chosen to work as a cluster of multidisciplinary experts.
Specific to Ocean Current Turbines, this allows evaluating blade profile possibilities with consideration of the consequences on manufacturing simplicity. The selection of blade root assemblies can weight benefits such as robustness, maintenance and costs, with regard to impacts on hydrodynamics performances. Structural
composite design is always performed with a mind to lay-up details and material processing.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF FLUID STRUCTURE INTERACTION Research on Fluid Structure Interaction usually focuses on numerical coupling schemes and their implementation. At cluster Meca, they promote a pragmatic fluid structure interaction, based on everyday exchanges between their engineering teams. Their experiences in turbine design have proven that there lies a great source of efficiency improvement.
Meca Calculs
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29
