Abstract
To share the construction and maintenance cost, an asymmetric oscillating water column (OWC) device integrated with a pile-fixed box-typed offshore breakwater is considered experimentally and numerically. A fully nonlinear numerical wave tank is established and validated with the open source solver OpenFOAM. The effects of the width and draft of rear box, and the incident wave height on the wave energy conversion efficiency, reflection and transmission coefficients, and energy dissipation coefficient are examined. In addition, the superiority of the present coupling system, compared to the traditional box-type breakwater, is discussed. With well comparisons, the results show that the existence of the rear breakwater is beneficial for the formation of partial standing waves and further wave energy conversion. In the range of wave heights tested, the higher the incident wave height, the larger the energy absorption efficiency except for the short-wave regimes. Moreover, the OWC-breakwater coupling system can obtain a similar wave blocking ability to the traditional one, and simultaneously extract wave energy and decrease wave reflection.
Highlights
The growing interest in the conversion and utilization of ocean wave energy source can be traced back to one century ago, since when various forms of wave energy extraction technologies began to appear (Falcão, 2010; You et al, 2010; Qiu et al, 2019)
The numerical simulation of the oscillating water column (OWC) device mounted on a box-type breakwater, employing the well-validated numerical wave tank (NWT) model, was carried out to explore the hydrodynamic performance, which is affected by the width and draft of the rear box, as well as the incident wave height
It is noted that the effects of the draft of front wall and chamber size on the hydrodynamic performance have received much attention in the literature; in this paper, the focus will be mainly paid to the structure configuration of the box
Summary
The growing interest in the conversion and utilization of ocean wave energy source can be traced back to one century ago, since when various forms of wave energy extraction technologies began to appear (Falcão, 2010; You et al, 2010; Qiu et al, 2019). The oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converter (WEC) is considered to be one of the most widely used technologies for its simple structure, easy installation and maintenance, and non-corrosive mechanical components (Falcão, 2010; Heath, 2012), whose main working principle is that the air-chamber pressure fluctuation induced by the heave motion of interior water column feeds the generator mounted on the top to fulfill the energy conversion. The study on OWC device is concentrated on the hydrodynamic performance and efficiency optimization in terms of the structural configuration of a stand-alone OWC device. Evans (1982) put forward the surface air pressure distribution theory and derived the expression of the optimal energy conversion efficiency of OWC devices. In order to further improve the hydrodynamic performance, in the literature, many scholars attempted
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