Numerical Analysis of the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Considering Different Incident Wave Height

Abstract

The ocean wave energy conversion into electricity has been increasingly researched in the last years. There are several proposed converters, among them the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) device has been widely studied. The present paper presents a two-dimensional numerical investigation about the fluid dynamics behavior of an OWC Wave Energy Converter (WEC) into electrical energy. The main goal of this work was to numerically analyze the optimized geometric shape obtained in previous work under incident waves with different heights. To do so, the OWC geometric shape was kept constant while the incident wave height was varied. For the numerical solution it was used the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) commercial code FLUENT®, based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM). The multiphasic Volume of Fluid (VOF) model was applied to tackle with the water-air interaction. The computational domain is represented by the OWC device coupled with the wave tank. This work allowed to check the influence of the incident wave height on the hydropneumatic power and the amplification factor of the OWC converter. It was possible to identify that the amplification factor increases as the wave period increases, thereby improving the OWC performance. It is worth to highlight that in the real phenomenon the incident waves on the OWC device have periods, lengths and height variables.