Abstract
The performance of a dual-chamber Oscillating Water Column (OWC) Wave Energy Converter (WEC) is considered in the present study. The device has two sub-chambers with a shared orifice. A two-dimensional (2D) fully nonlinear numerical wave flume based on the potential-flow theory and the time-domain higher-order boundary element method (HOBEM) is applied for the simulation. The incident waves are generated by using the immerged sources and the air-fluid coupling influence is considered with a simplified pneumatic model. In the present study, the variation of the surface elevation and the water column volume in the two sub-chambers are investigated. The effects of the chamber geometry (i.e., the draft and breadth of two chambers) on the surface elevation and the air pressure in the chamber are investigated, respectively. It is demonstrated that the surface elevations in the two sub-chambers are strongly dependent on the wave conditions. The larger the wavelength, the more synchronous motion of the two water columns in the two sub-chambers, thus, the lager the variation of the water column volume.
Highlights
For the leap in power technologies to become a sustainable society, we are under obligation to cope with the warming of the global environment and to conserve the natural ecosystem and coexist with nature [1]
This paper considers a dual-chamber Oscillating Water Column (OWC) by a fully nonlinear numerical model
To investigate the hydrodynamic performance of the proposed dual-chamber OWC device, the two-dimensional fully nonlinear numerical model based on the potential theory and the time-domain higher-order boundary element method (HOBEM) by Ning et al [11] is extended here to simulate the interaction of the wave and the dual-chamber OWC device by adding a barrier wall in the single chamber device
Summary
For the leap in power technologies to become a sustainable society, we are under obligation to cope with the warming of the global environment and to conserve the natural ecosystem and coexist with nature [1]. Rezanejad et al [31] and Rezanejad et al [32] analytically and numerically analyzed the hydrodynamic efficiency of a dual-chamber OWC placed over stepped bottom They found that a dual-chamber OWC device on the stepped sea bottom can improve the performance of the device significantly in a wide range of frequencies, as compared with the single chamber case. He et al [33] found that the dual chambers could widen the efficiency bandwidth of power extraction in their experimental study of floating box-type breakwaters with dual pneumatic chambers.
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