Buoy geometry and its influence on survivability for apoint absorbing wave energy converter : Scaleexperiment and CFD simulations

• For wave energy to be an economically viable energysource, the technology has to withstand power levelsduring storms that can be close to 50 times higher thanduring normal operating conditions, and withstandmany years of wear. The impact of high wave loads isstudied not only within the field of wave energy, buthas long been a subject of study for ships, platformsand other offshore structures.To model the force on the device under extreme and/orovertopping waves is a difficult task. Experiments areexpensive and difficult to implement, and numerical meth-ods are either very computationally demanding CFD-methods, or less accurate approximative methods. Inaddition, the performance and experienced forces during extreme waves are model dependent, and differentoffshore structures must be studied independently.Here, a 1:20 scale model of the Uppsala Universitypoint-absorber type wave energy converter (WEC) has been tested in extreme wave conditions at the COASTLaboratory Ocean Basin at Plymouth University. The WEC consists of a linear generator connected to a buoyat the sea surface, and performance of two differentbuoys is studied: a cylinder and cylinder with moon-pool. Two types of wave sets have been used: focusedwaves embedded into regular waves, and irregular waves. The focus of this paperis on comparing the performance of the two buoys, and on analysing the experimental data using a numerical model. A fully non-linear computational fluid dynamics(CFD) model based on OpenFOAM is presented and validated.

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