A STUDY ON POINT ABSORBER WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER

Abstract

Today's generation is facing energy crunches due to limited resources of fossil fuels, environmental pollution, increasing the cost of conventional fuels and lower efficiency of conversion of energy in existing systems. There is an urgent need to find alternative sources of energy so as to fulfill present and future energy needs. In this context, one of the potential alternatives for power generation is wave energy. However, it is difficult to estimate the amount of electrical energy generation in irregular sea condition by experiment and or analytical methods. Therefore in this work, a numerical wave tank is developed using the Computational Fluid Dynamics software OpenFOAM2.3.0. In this software, a specific utility known as the waves2Foam utility is being used to carry out the simulation work. The computational domain is a tank of dimension: 20m*1.8m*1m with a floating object of dimension: 0.5m*0.2m*0.1m. Regular waves are generated at the inlet of the wave tank according to Stokes second-order theory. The main objective of the present study is to validate the numerical model against existing experimental data. It shows a good matching with the existing experimental data of floater displacement. Later the model is exploited to estimate energy extraction due to the movement of such a point absorber in real sea conditions. Scale down the wave properties like wave height, the wavelength is used as input parameters. In the project, we have been able to develop for the modification of waveFoam to waveDyMFoam so that we are able to provide motion to the object and find out the suitability of the cuboid object at different wave heights with respect to its displacement, energy, and efficiency.