COMPARISON OF NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS FOR OVERTOPPING DISCHARGE OF THE OBREC WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER

Abstract

OBREC is the latest innovation of overtopping wave energy converter (WEC) which is coalesced with the rubble mound breakwaters. The acquisition of wave overtopping in a front reservoir and consequently releasing process through turbine is the concept of energy production in OBREC. The physical scale model studies of overtopping discharge of the OBREC have recently been done by previous researcher in wave flume at Aalborg University. This paper demonstrates the overtopping behavior of OBREC device using a VOF method with capabilities to solve RANS equation in the numerical suite Flow3D. The purpose of this research is to validate the overtopping discharge performance of the numerical model against the experiments of the OBREC. Based on the observation, the results have shown a good agreement between the validation and physical experiment.

Keywords

• Wave energy converters
• Wave overtopping
• CFD modeling.
• CFD modeling