As the world turns further and further away from fossil fuel energy sources, unconventional and renewable sources of energy, such as power generation from water sources and wind energy, are becoming more and more important. Hydropower has been around for decades, but Wave, Wind, and Current Power Generation suggests new methods that are more cost-effective and less intrusive to the environment for creating power sources from rivers, the tides, and other sources of water.

This paper presents a new method for approximately modeling 2-D ideal steady fluid flows with finite vorticity induced by actuator curves of arbitrary shape. An actuator curve is an infinitesimally thin region containing a body force density acting on the flow, while the rest of the flow is force-free. The approach can be used for any flow satisfying this description, but, like other actuator methods, it is naturally suited for modeling turbines or propellers.