Nonlinear computations of heave motions for a generic Wave Energy Converter

Paper in proceeding, 2018

A benchmarking activity of numerical methods for analysis of Wave Energy Converters (WEC) was proposed under the Ocean Energy Systems (OES) International Energy Agency (IEA) Task 10 in 2015. The purpose of the benchmark is to do a code-2-code comparison of the predicted motions and power take out for a WEC. A heaving sphere was used as a first simple test case. The participants simulated heave decay and regular and irregular wave cases. The numerical methods ranged from linear methods to viscous methods solving the Navier-Stokes equations (CFD). An overview of the results from the first phase of the benchmark was reported in (Wendt et al 2017).

The present paper focus on the simulations of the sphere using one fully nonlinear time-domain BEM method one transient RANS method and one transient Direct  FE method with no turbulence model. The theory of the three methods as well as the modelling of the sphere are described. Heave decay and heave motions for steep regular waves were selected as test cases in order to study and compare the capability to handle nonlinear effects. Computational efficiency and applicability of the three methods are also discussed.