In this paper, a numerical experiment on a tidal turbine was performed based on a water wheel design using the commercial CFD code ANSYS-CFX to contribute to the development of water wheels. The water wheel type tidal turbine was studied with different numbers of rotor blades (including ten, twelve and twenty blades types) and with different blade shapes (Straight, Curved and Zuppinger types) for comparison at several values of tip speed ratio (TSR) ranging from 0.7 to 1.2. The numerical results indicated that the 10-bladed type and the Straight-bladed type turbines absorb the highest power efficiency, up to 43 % at TSR 0.9. In addition, the 20-bladed and the Curved-bladed types showed the lowest performances in all cases of TSRs comparing with the others. Besides that, it was found that this turbine operates much effectively at low range of TSR, especially at TSRs 0.9 and 1 for all cases of blade shapes and all numbers of blades.