SPH NUMERICAL MODELLING OF A U-OWC WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER

This paper presents numerical simulations of a U- Oscillating Water Column (U-OWC) wave energy converter excited by regular sea waves. This device is an OWC (oscillating water column) converter comprising a U- duct at the seafront. As for the OWC device, it exploits the water column oscillations for compressing and expanding the air chamber above the water column with the purpose of producing an air flow through the turbine connected to the air chamber. However, the U-OWC comprises also a U-duct at the seafront that allows the converter to reach resonance conditions with the sea waves. A U-OWC prototype was installed in the Civitavecchia harbor (Arena, et al. 2013). Herein, to model the U-OWC wave energy converter, Smoothing Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has been adopted and implemented through the DualSPHysics software (Dominguez et al., 2022).