Study of the Geometry of an Oscillating Water Column Device with Five Chambers Coupled under Regular Waves through the Constructal Design Method

Abstract

This research conducts a numerical study of a wave energy converter (WEC) device with five coupled hydropneumatic chambers, operating based on the principle of an oscillating water column (OWC). A turbine was not included, only considering the tube without it. The computational domain was defined by a wave channel housing an OWC device subjected to regular incident waves. The central objective was to assess the impact of chamber geometry on maximizing the total hydropneumatic power in energy conversion. The numerical simulations consider the pressure, mass flow rate, and total hydropneumatic power, with the latter being the performance indicator. To determine the geometries to be analyzed, the Constructal Design method was employed in conjunction with the exhaustive search optimization method to maximize the performance indicator. The degrees of freedom defined were the ratios between the height (Hn) and the length (Ln) of the hydropneumatic chambers (Hn/Ln, where n varies from one to five). Based on the results of the mass flow rate and pressure, their influence on power was evaluated. It was observed that the influence of the degrees of freedom on the pressure difference, mass flow rate, and hydrodynamic power was quite similar, displaying an increase for low ratios of Hn/Ln up to a maximum magnitude and followed by a decrease in magnitude. The best performance was achieved for the geometric configuration with Hn/Ln = 0.2613 (Hn = 5.0625 m and Ln = 15.8219 m), representing an improvement of 98.6% compared to the worst case analyzed.

Keywords

• constructal design
• oscillating water column (OWC)
• wave energy