Hydrodynamic performance of rectangular heaving buoys for an integrated floating breakwater

Abstract

Recently, the integrated development of wave energy converters and breakwaters has become popular, moving from traditional passive wave absorption to active energy capture. In this study, rectangular heaving buoys are considered as floating breakwater modules to absorb wave energy. A numerical wave tank is established based on Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equation and User-Define-Function in ANSYS-Fluent commercial software. The numerical results show that incident wave conditions and submerged depth have significant effects on the heaving performance and wave energy absorption of a rectangular buoy. Flow structures around the buoy are shown to exhibit flow separations and vortex shedding, which can provide more information on buoy optimization. Power take-off(PTO) reaction forces are assumed to be a linear function of the translation velocities of the buoy. Numerical results demonstrate that a suitable PTO module can improve the wave power absorption by up to 34.2% for certain buoy and wave conditions, which is valuable for further investigations.