A numerical study on float design for wave energy converter

Abstract

In the present work, a computational fluid dynamic simulation has been performed to investigate the movement of free-floating objects in wavy water. The movement of objects of different shapes, namely rectangular, trapezoidal, and hemisphere, has been simulated using the volume of the fluid model, and a satisfactory match between the simulated data and experimental results has been obtained. It is observed that the nature of vortices influences the movement of different shapes of the same mass. The rectangular shape has more vertical displacement as compared to the other two shapes. With the increase in characteristic dimension, power absorption efficiency increases and become constant, indicating a critical value of characteristic dimension for a given wave condition. On the other hand, with an increase in wave height, power absorption increases, but efficiency decreases. Trapezoidal shape with fin found to be optimum float shape.