HYDRODYNAMICS OF A DUAL-CHAMBER OWC WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER IN HEAVING MOTION

Abstract

The oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy conversion device have been recognized as the most promising wave energy conversion technology due to the advantages of its simple structure, convenient assembly and easy maintenance. A heave-only dual-chamber OWC device was numerically investigated by a well-developed open source software OpenFOAM coupled with a wave generation and absorption toolbox Waves2Foam. The volume of fluid (VOF) method tracking the water-air interface and the six-degree-freedom (6DOF) Dynamic Mesh solver duplicating the heave motion of the OWC device were employed to examine the influences of the relative width of the front and rear chambers and the spring elastic coefficient on the energy capture width ratio and hydrodynamic characteristics of the device under the actions of different incident regular waves. Through comparing the present results with the existing ones of a fixed dual-chamber OWC wave energy converter, and examining the free-decay motion of a cylinder, the rationality and effectiveness of the present numerical model has been revealed. The results show that the wider rear chamber can make for the extraction of wave energy of the dual-chamber OWC in heave motion. The heave-only dual-chamber OWC device can improve the device performance as the relative width ratio of the front and rear chambers is 1/2, and the rear chamber has larger capture width ratio in the middle and high frequency wave bands, compared with that of the fixed one. Multiple-peak values of the relative water surface elevation and the relative pressure occur in the whole test wave frequency bands due to the phase gap between the dual-chamber OWC device and the water columns in the front and rear chambers. In addition, it is found that by adjusting the spring stiffness coefficient, the wave-frequency bandwidth of high-efficiency can be significantly broadened and larger energy capture width ratio can be achieved.