ORPC designed and built a modular fairing for the Modular RivGen® MHK turbine, which accommodates the efficient deployment and operation of turbine arrays. The modular support also acts to augment the flow into the rotor for increased power production. This work aims to optimize the hydrodynamic performance of the flow augmentation using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study. The influence of two geometric parameters was assessed: the fairing cross-sectional shape and the rotor-fairing spacing. In addition to net power, the analysis looked at discretized loading of the turbine components, to evaluate both ultimate and fatigue loads.

The numerical modeling used the commercial CFD code, Star-CCM+ and the open-source code OpenFOAM. This code-to-code verification was intended to increase confidence in the results and in the use of open-source tools for high fidelity marine energy modeling. The use of OpenFOAM also took advantage of an actuator line library, turbinesFoam.