Development of analysis tools for self-rectifying impulse turbines for OWC systems

The paper presents the development of Performance Analysis Tools for Impulse-turbines for Oscillating water column wave energy converters, PATIOS. PATIOS applies the experimental correlations for axial turbomachines to self-rectifying impulse turbine and, with limited computational resources, provides prompt results as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of the losses. Models and correlations for an OWC system with self-rectifying impulse turbine are presented and analyzed; the whole set was implemented in Matlab-Simulink environment. CFD simulations have been run to validate the results. PATIOS has been used for a wide-range sensitivity analysis, identifying the most relevant design variables and comparing the results with the experimental ones, available in the literature.