Current Research | Renewable Energy

CFD and EFD Assessment of Oscillating Water Column Wave Energy Device

This project aims to develop experimental and numerical (CFD) methodologies to assess the performance of a wave energy converter (WEC) using the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) technology. By using the validated methodology, the tank width effect and scale effect on the performance of the OWC device are also investigated through both experiment and CFD.

The experiment was carried out in the Kelvin Hydrodynamic lab of University of Strathclyde. The CFD simulation was achieved by using commercial FVM package Star-ccm+. Figure 1 shows the comparison between the physical model and numerical model. A reflection free numerical wave tank (Figure 2) is developed by using Euler overlay Method (EOM) to mimic the active absorbing wave maker in the Kelvin Hydrodynamic tank. The power captured by the OWC device in the tank and that calculated by CFD are compared in Figure 3.

Figure 1 Comparison between the physical OWC model and numerical OWC model. where in b) 1 is the orifice plate that used to simulate the power take off system, 2 is the main chamber, 3 a ring that is used to reduce the vortices

Figure 2 Computation domain and boundary conditions

Figure 3 Comparison between the power captured by the OWC device in experiment and that calculated by CFD. Where Kh is the non-dimensional incident wave frequency

Please refer to:

Dai S, Day S, Xiao Q. An experimental and analytical investigation on the hydrodynamic efficiency of a cylindrical oscillating water column wave energy device. ICMT2014, 7th-9th July 2014, Glasgow, UK