Numerical simulation of a stationary offshore multi-chamber OWC wave energy converter

This paper aims to study the improvement in hydrodynamic efficiency of an OWC device by dividing a single chamber into multiple chambers. The two-dimensional incompressible Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved to simulate the water motion due to waves and a compressible aerodynamic model is used to calculate the airflow through the turbine. Simulation of a dual-chamber-two-turbine (2C2T) case was first conducted using a range of turbine coefficients to identify the best turbine coefficient to be used for the rest of the study. The dual-chamber-dual-turbine configuration was found to increase the efficiency more than the case of two chambers sharing a single turbine (2C1T). The triple-chamber-triple-turbine (3C3T) configuration further increases the efficiency when compared with the 2C2T configuration. Despite achieving greater changes in free surface elevation, when compared with multi-turbine multi-chamber configurations, shared turbine configurations achieve lower overall efficiency due to phase differences in surface elevation between chambers.