Geometric Evaluation of the Hydro-Pneumatic Chamber of an Oscillating Water Column Wave Energy Converter Employing an Axisymmetric Computational Model Submitted to a Realistic Sea State Data

Abstract

In this research, considering the air methodology, an axisymmetric model was developed, validated, and calibrated for the numerical simulation of an Oscillating Water Column (OWC) converter subjected to a realistic sea state, representative of the Cassino beach, in the south of Brazil. To do so, the Finite Volume Method (FVM) was used, through the Fluent software (Version 18.1), for the airflow inside the hydro-pneumatic chamber and turbine duct of the OWC. Furthermore, the influence of geometric parameters on the available power of the OWC converter was evaluated through Constructal Design combined with Exhaustive Search. For this, a search space with 100 geometric configurations for the hydro-pneumatic chamber was defined by means of the variation in two degrees of freedom: the ratio between the height and diameter of the hydro-pneumatic chamber (H1/L1) and the ratio between the height and diameter of the smallest base of the connection, whose surface of revolution has a trapezoidal shape, between the hydro-pneumatic chamber and the turbine duct (H2/L2). The ratio between the height and diameter of the turbine duct (H3/L3) was kept constant. The results indicated that the highest available power of the converter was achieved by the lowest values of H1/L1 and highest values of H2/L2, with the optimal case being obtained by H1/L1 = 0.1 and H2/L2 = 0.81, achieving a power 839 times greater than the worst case. The values found are impractical in real devices, making it necessary to limit the power of the converters to 500 kW to make this assessment closer to reality; thus, the highest power obtained was 15.5 times greater than that found in the worst case, these values being consistent with other studies developed. As a theoretical recommendation for practical purposes, one can infer that the ratio H1/L1 has a greater influence over the OWC’s available power than the ratio H2/L2.