Performance analysis of a wave energy converter using numerical simulation technique

A general purpose viscous flow solver Ansys CFX was used to study a Savonius type wave energy converter in a 3D numerical viscous wave tank. This paper presents the results of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the effect of blade configuration on the performance of two Savonius rotors for wave energy extraction. A piston-type wave generator was incorporated in the computational domain to generate the desired incident waves. A complete OWC system with a 3-bladed Savonius rotor was modeled in a three dimensional numerical wave tank and the hydrodynamic conversion efficiency was estimated. The flow over the rotors was assumed to be two-dimensional (2D), viscous, turbulent and unsteady. The CFX code was used with a solver of the coupled conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, with an implicit time scheme and with the adoption of the hexahedral mesh and the moving mesh techniques in areas of moving surfaces. Turbulence was modeled with the k-e model. The results indicated that the developed models are suitable to analyze the water flows both in the chamber and in the turbine. For the turbine, the numerical results of pressure and torque were compared for the two cases.