Radial basis function-finite difference method to investigate the wave energy extraction by a land-fixed oscillating water column device

The rapid progress of renewable energy technologies demonstrates that new methods for hydrodynamic analysis are beneficial in addressing the numerical challenges within the field, especially when they exhibit both high accuracy and computational efficiency. In this paper, a novel meshless method based on the radial basis function is developed to simulate wave energy extraction by a land-fixed oscillating water column device. To account for energy loss due to the fluid viscosity, an artificial viscosity term is added to the dynamic free surface boundary condition. An in-house computer program, utilizing an effective memory storage strategy and the proposed numerical procedure, has been developed to demonstrate the capability of the proposed meshless numerical wave flume in simulating wave-structure interactions. Reasonable accuracy and computational efficiency are observed by comparing the results against analytical solutions and experimental data. Acceptable accuracy is achieved when the maximum number of nodes is nearly twice the minimum number of nodes in the stencil at each time step.