Author(s)

Yanna Zheng^1,2*, Dexing Liu³, Hongwei An², Wenjia Sun¹, Tiaojian Xu⁴

¹School of Ocean and Civil Engineering, Dalian Ocean University, Dalian, China.
²School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
³Zhejiang Windy Company Limited, Hangzhou, China.
⁴State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China.

A comprehensive energy-saving sail (CES) has been proposed in order to promote energy saving and emission reduction from shipping. Wind energy is harvested for propulsion and electrical generator at the same time by a unique structure of CES. A CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code is verified by a case of arc wind sail, and it is used to simulate the pressure and velocity around the CES. The results show that the outlet velocity of air tunnel V_o and wind velocity V_i serve as an equation V_o ≈ 1.31V_i, which means the CES can effectively improve the conversion efficiency. In addition, it is found that V_o increases with the tunnel diameter to some extend over which it will keep almost constant.

Energy-Saving Sail, Wind Power Generation, Wind-Assisted Propulsion

Zheng, Y. , Liu, D. , An, H. , Sun, W. and Xu, T. (2016) Study on a Comprehensive Energy-Saving Sail by CFD Method. Open Journal of Fluid Dynamics, 6, 145-155. doi: 10.4236/ojfd.2016.63012.