Experimental and Numerical Investigation on Blade Sweep to Improve Performance of an OWC Turbine

The energy of sea waves is one of the renewable energies. The wells turbine uses the airflow produced by the pressure change inside the oscillating water column. A visible radial drift from the main flow occurs downstream of the rotor is noticed in the turbines wells with a constant chord length of the blade. Indeed, a blade chord linearly increasing with a radius is proposed in order to minimize this phenomenon and to increase the local coefficient of lift of the blade. In this context an investigated experimental and computational method are carried out to analyze the performances of two types of Wells turbines, one with a constant chord blade (rectangular-shaped blade) and the other with the blade's agreement increasing linearly (Swept blade). The results obtained show an improvement in the performance of the Wells turbine with a swept blade.