Ocean Energy Systems Wave Energy Modeling Task 10.4: Numerical Modeling of a Fixed Oscillating Water Column

Harry B. Bingham*, Yi-Hsiang Yu, Kim Nielsen, Thanh Toan Tran, Kyong-Hwan Kim, Sewan Park, Keyyong Hong, Hafiz Ahsan Said, Thomas Kelly, John V. Ringwood, Robert W. Read, Edward Ransley, Scott Brown, Deborah Greaves

*Corresponding author for this work

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    Abstract

    This paper reports on an ongoing international effort to establish guidelines for numerical modeling of wave energy converters, initiated by the International Energy Agency Technology Collaboration Program for Ocean Energy Systems. Initial results for point absorbers were presented in previous work, and here we present results for a breakwater-mounted Oscillating Water Column (OWC) device. The experimental model is at scale 1:4 relative to a full-scale installation in a water depth of 12.8 m. The power-extracting air turbine is modeled by an orifice plate of 1–2% of the internal chamber surface area. Measurements of chamber surface elevation, air flow through the orifice, and pressure difference across the orifice are compared with numerical calculations using both weakly-nonlinear potential flow theory and computational fluid dynamics. Both compressible- and incompressible-flow models are considered, and the effects of air compressibility are found to have a significant influence on the motion of the internal chamber surface. Recommendations are made for reducing uncertainties in future experimental campaigns, which are critical to enable firm conclusions to be drawn about the relative accuracy of the numerical models. It is well-known that boundary element method solutions of the linear potential flow problem (e.g., WAMIT) are singular at infinite frequency when panels are placed directly on the free surface. This is problematic for time-domain solutions where the value of the added mass matrix at infinite frequency is critical, especially for OWC chambers, which are modeled by zero-mass elements on the free surface. A straightforward rational procedure is described to replace ad-hoc solutions to this problem that have been proposed in the literature.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number1718
    JournalEnergies
    Volume14
    Issue number6
    Number of pages35
    ISSN1996-1073
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Bibliographical note

    Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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