Advanced computational simulations of water waves interacting with wave energy converters

Abstract

Wave energy converter (WEC) devices harness the renewable ocean wave energy and convert it into useful forms of energy, e.g. mechanical or electrical. This paper presents an advanced 3D computational framework to study the interaction between water waves and WEC devices. The computational tool solves the full Navier–Stokes equations and considers all important effects impacting the device performance. To enable large-scale simulations in fast turnaround times, the computational solver was developed in an MPI parallel framework. A fast multigrid preconditioned solver is introduced to solve the computationally expensive pressure Poisson equation. The computational solver was applied to two surface-piercing WEC geometries: bottom-hinged cylinder and flap. Their numerically simulated response was validated against experimental data. Additional simulations were conducted to investigate the applicability of Froude scaling in predicting full-scale WEC response from the model experiments.

Keywords:

• Multi-phase
• fluid–structure interaction
• volume-of-fluid
• surface piercing
• wave energy converter
• Froude scaling

Acknowledgements

AP gratefully acknowledges the Fellowship from the Office of the Associate Provost for Graduate Studies at UMass Dartmouth.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research support from the National Science Foundation (Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems) under the CBET [grant number 1236462], [grant number 1336232] is gratefully acknowledged. The simulations presented here were performed on the UMass Dartmouth HPC cluster, which was purchased through partial support from the NSF [MRI grant number CNS-0959382] and AFOSR [DURIP grant number FA9550-10-1-0354].