CRIMSON Project: De-risking Tank Testing of Large-scale Hydrokinetic Turbines

This paper describes the development of a test-rig for demonstration trials of a full scale turbine in a large towing tank. The activity was part of the EU Horizon 2020 CRIMSON project and addressed a 20 kW full-scale module of the RivGen© Power System by ORPC tested in the Large Calm Water Towing Tank at the Institute of Marine Engineering of the Italian National Research Council. The test matrix covered the relevant range of turbine operating conditions in the real environment. A methodology integrating state-of-art digital models was developed to simulate device set-up, deployment, operation and retrieval, and realize a test-rig for safe and smooth operations. Computational Fluid Dynamics was used to estimate the hydrodynamic loads generated by the turbine, whereas Finite Element Analysis calculations validated the strenght requirements of the structure fixing the turbine to the towing carriage and identified harmful conditions during operations. The design of experiment delivered new knowledge about testing large-scale, fully-equipped hydrokinetic turbines in the controlled and repeatable environment of a towing tank. The resulting testing framework can effectively contribute to de-risk the deployment of turbines and other marine renwable energy systems in the real operating environment.