Wave Energy Conversion: A Comparison of Fix and Floating of Oscillating Water Column for Low Wave Energy

Abstract

Oscillating Water Column (OWC) is a wave energy converter (WEC) that generates electricity through energy conversion. Two types of OWC are used to harvest the wave power, fixed and floating OWC. Wave energy can certainly be converted and used more or less directly to perform mechanical work. Energy from the wave can be generated using various technologies that capture energy from the surface wave or pressure fluctuation below the surface. At present, less study has been conducted on OWC devices at low wave height. Thus, this paper presents a numerical study on the current OWC device at a low wave height lower than 2.25m. The OWC performance is determined using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software to identify the device efficiency. Autodesk Inventor is used to designing the OWC device, referring to the floating and fixed design. Then these designs are imported into CFD software to simulate and to obtain the energy extraction result. The CFD software is chosen to simulate the hydrodynamics problem. The devices are scale to1:20 and 1:16 ratio respectively. Three different wave height(0.25m,0.75m,2.25m) are used. The final study on pressure at air duct, pressure flow from the chamber to the air duct, the velocity of the air and power estimation have been carried out. The result shows that the floating model device-generated 8624W and followed by the fixed model device is 260W