Optimization of hydrofoil for tidal current turbine based on particle swarm optimization and computational fluid dynamic method

Both efficiency and cavitation performance of the hydrofoil are the key technologies to design the tidal current turbine. In this paper, the hydrofoil efficiency and lift coefficient were improved based on particle swarm optimization method and XFoil codes. The cavitation performance of the optimized hydrofoil was also discussed by the computational fluid dynamic. Numerical results show the efficiency of the optimized hydrofoil was improved 11% ranging from the attack angle of 0-7° compared to the original NACA63-818 hydrofoil. The minimum pressure on leading edge of the optimized hydrofoil dropped above 15% at the high attack angle conditions of 10°, 15°, and 20°, respectively, which is benefit for the hydrofoil to avoiding the cavitation.