On the Extractable Power from a Tidal Channel

Abstract

The drive to develop marine renewable energy has made resource assessments a matter of pressing need and ongoing research. In the case of tidal in-stream power generation, a central objective of such assessments is to estimate the maximum power that may be extracted from tidal motions based on observable properties of the flow in the natural undisturbed state. To this end, analytical models have been developed for simple geometries, such as a channel connecting the open ocean to an inner basin. A key assumption of these models is that the along-channel volume flux is nondivergent. This requires the channel length to be small in comparison to the tidal wavelength and also that