Investigation of the airfoils and blade geometry effects on the performance of hydrokinetic turbines

The present study investigates the effects of chord distribution and twist angle distribution using asymmetric Joukowski, Gottingen 420 and NACA 4418 airfoils on the aerodynamic performance of blades in a horizontal axis hydrokinetic turbine. A home built code was developed using the MATLAB, the code based on the blade element momentum theory is optimized and validated against available experimental and numerical results. In which the results showed that the asymmetric Joukowski airfoil with constant twist angle and linear chord distribution presented the best configuration for the blade, resulting in generated power of 14.205 kW, Cp of 0.504, annual energy production of 124.441 MWh.