Review paper on oscillating / flapping hydrokinetic turbines

Abstract Addressing today’s energy demands involves various challenges, especially in the global effort to reduce waste and pollution. Energy from flowing water stands out as a clean and accessible solution due to its wide availability and minimal environmental impact. One type of technology used to harness this energy is the hydrokinetic turbine, with flapping or oscillating turbines being particularly interesting. This paper presents a systematic literature review following the PRISMA approach. Starting with 124 publications from Scopus and Web of Science databases, the review was narrowed down to 95 after duplicates were excluded. Then turns out that only 91 papers were accessible. 27 papers remained after going through our criteria. Last, after manually checking for eligibility, 20 papers remained. These are the peer-reviewed articles from 2020 to 2024, focusing on studies using analytical methods, numerical simulation, or experiment. Bibliometric and co-occurrence analyses were used to identify major trends and gaps in current research. This paper summarizes the selected studies’ methods and findings and compares several parameters, including flow velocity or Reynolds number, heaving amplitude, pitching amplitude, geometry, and other influencing factors. The discussion is organized into three main aspects: turbine mechanism, configuration, and kinematics. As such, this review offers useful insights into the current research on flapping/oscillating hydrokinetic turbines and the future research direction. Currently, many researchers focus on the optimization of a fully passive mechanism. In the future, the focus will still be on a fully passive mechanism, but on the fluid structure interaction.