Hydrodynamic behavior of resonant chamber of an oscillating column of water for Pacific Ocean conditions

Abstract

Wave energy converters (WEC) may be a promising option for extracting the energy available in the sea and oceans in a clean way. The oscillating water column (OWC) is one of the most applicable and well-known WEC systems. In this paper, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using ANSYS-Fluent software is employed to numerically simulate an OWC at the shore adapted to Pacific Ocean conditions, Reynolds averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations are solved through the software in two dimensions (2D). The laminar viscosity model and the Volume of Fluid (VOF) scheme are used for the fluid modeling and the description of the water-air interface, respectively. The waves are generated using Stokes second order nonlinear theory by directly fitting as input the boundary condition as an open channel wave and the volume fraction parameters through implicit formulation. The maximum chamber efficiency and the mean free surface velocity of the water column for the studied geometry were 67.2% and 0.12m/s, respectively.

Keywords

• Numerical modelling
• Wave energy
• Computational fluid dynamics
• OWC