France – Mardi 22/10/2019 – energiesdelamer.eu. Ancre – Colloque des Doctorants – 14ème intervenant : MarcBatlle Martin

In the scope of renewable energy transition, the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) is presented as a promising opportunity for further investigation.

It is a source of clean energy extracted from water waves potential energy. The device is a semi-submerged structure which is connected to the open sea through its submerged area, allowing water to enter or leave the chamber. The elevation of the free surface due to waves in front of the structure produces also a rise of the free surface inside the chamber, which compresses the entrapped air and this is forced to flow throw a turbine. This turbine rotation connected to an electric generator produces energy from the free surface oscillations inside the chamber.

From this brief description it is easy to extract the fact that higher waves produce higher amplitudes on the oscillations and, consequently, more energy. By this means, the necessity of assessing the extreme waves loads is one of the key points to make this kind of device feasible. The computation capacity disposed nowadays makes the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) a very powerful tool to evaluate this phenomenon. This should not substitute the physical tests, but fasten the process into a better com- prehension and achieve the most suitable solution in each scenario.

The task aimed in this work is to better predict the most unfavourable wave loads on a vertical breakwater structure. To do so, the open source software OpenFOAM using the Finite Volume Method (FVM) is the initial choice to tackle the problematic. Then, the Volume of Fluid (VoF) allows a two-phase approach where air and water will be modelled with multiple ways to handle the interface jump. Using this mature solver, the air-pocket or the flip-through plunging waves impact kinematics and dynamics are studied. The analysis stands on analytic and experimental comparisons regarding the limits between this approaches.

Agenda des événements sélectionnés par energiesdelamer.eu  :  Journée Doctoriale sur les thématiques du GP5 de l’ANCRE 23/10/2019


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