Hydrodynamic Analysis of a Multibody Wave Energy Converter System With a Vertical Wall

Abstract In this paper, two approaches, one based on the imaging principle and the other based on the modified Green function, are applied to solve the hydrodynamic coefficient evaluation problem of a wave energy converter system laying aside a long vertical wall. Initially, the previously in-house developed boundary element program called OREGEN-BEM is extended to solve the hydrodynamic problem in this scenario. Two validation case, considering a truncated cylinder and an array with five same truncated cylinders, sitting close to a vertical wall is conducted to validate the developed code. Both radiation and diffraction coefficients using these two presented approaches are validated against the referred results. The advantages and disadvantages of these two methods applied for the multibody converter system are thoroughly investigated in terms of data storage and computational cost. As far as we know, this is the first paper to compare the applications of these two approaches for the multibody energy converter system. After these two approaches are validated, they are applied to conduct parametric study of the multibody systems containing multiple bodies.