Virtual Fish Research Project

The hydroturbine industry would like to produce turbines that are less harmful to fish as they pass the blades and other obstacles.  Striking a blade or other structure, high levels of shear stress, pressure changes, and dizziness, can all harm fish.  The industry has been looking for ways to reduce these effects by redesigning the turbines.  However, there is much uncertainty as to which regions the fish are likely to pass through and what stresses they will encounter in each region. 

This project entails creating a new virtual fish program, the “York College Virtual Fish” (YCVF) and uses numerical solution of Potential flow equations around a virtual fish shape to find the forces on the fish at each time step as the YCVF passes through a CFD calculation of the turbine flow.