Experimental Study of Flow Augmenters on Flow and Drag in Marine Hydrokinetic Research

This study is intended to investigate flow augmentation that escapes from the power to weight scaling of horizontal axis turbines (HATs) for applications in marine hydrokinetics (MHK) research. Researchers will establish laboratory scale relationships between flow augmenters combinations and the power to weight ratio based on drag and flow measurements. Flow augmenters are of broad interest in the field of marine hydrokinetics for their ability to increase flow through a turbine relative to the same non-augmented turbine and therefore enable higher power extraction. Power extraction for turbines often follows a scaling ratio where to extract larger amounts of power, an increase in size and mass of the turbine is required. This increase then requires higher manufacture cost, more associated support infrastructure, as well as deployment costs and limitations.