Abstract
Wave energy converter (WEC) devices harness the renewable ocean wave energy and convert it into useful forms of energy, e.g., mechanical or electrical. In this dissertation an advanced 3D computational framework is presented to study the interaction between water waves and WEC devices. The computational tool solves the full Navier-Stokes equations and considers all important efects impacting the device performance. To enable large-scale simulations in fast turnaround times, the computational solver was developed in an MPI parallel framework. A fast multigrid preconditioned solver is introduced to solve the computationally expensive pressure Poisson equation. Simulating a floating object, representative of WECs, interacting with two uids having high density ratio is a challenging problem for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers. Special schemes were implemented to ensure robustness and numerical stability of the solver in handling such cases and a wide range of other problems. Since the wave energy is concentrated near the water free surface,the emphasis lately has been on the study of surface piercing WEC devices. A novel three-phase reconstruction algorithm was developed to enable such studies via numerical simulations. The constituent components of the proposed solver was validated against benchmark problems. The solver was then applied to a bottom-hinged flap-type WEC oscillating due to water waves. The numerical WEC response and water free surface dynamics were compared with experimental time series data and a good agreement was found. Additional simulations were conducted to investigate the applicability of Froude scaling in predicting full scale WEC response from the model experiments.