Centred and staggered arrangements of tidal turbines

Abstract

In this paper we extend linear momentum actuator disc theory to consider two rows of tidal turbines placed in a centred or staggered arrangement. The extensions assume a streamwise spacing between rows that is sufficient for pressure equalization, but is not too large for significant mixing of the upstream turbine wake before the second row. We first consider a given number of turbines in a tidal channel; in this case the average power for a staggered arrangement over two rows is found to be higher than that for a centred arrangement, but lower than can be obtained by placing all turbines side-by-side in one row (if all turbines have the same local resistance). Furthermore, staggered arrangements extract power more efficiently than centred arrangements, but less efficiently than a single row with the same number of turbines, and this has implications for ranking different arrangements of tidal turbines. We also use the extended actuator disc models (together with an argument of scale separation) to consider some example arrangements of tidal turbines in laterally unconfined flow. Specifically, it is shown that locally staggering a fixed number of turbines in an array to form a tidal farm generates less power than placing the same number of turbines side-by-side. However, if more than one row of turbines is adopted (perhaps to keep the farm spatially compact) then the optimum turbine spacing within a row increases significantly with addition of a second row. This trend suggests that multi-row tidal turbine farms would require wide turbine spacing within each row to maximize the power per turbine, similarly to existing offshore wind farms.