Windt, Christian and Davidson, Josh and Ringwood, John (2021) Investigation of Turbulence Modeling for Point-Absorber-Type Wave Energy Converters. Energies, 14 (26). ISSN 1996-1073

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Abstract

Reviewing the literature of CFD-based numerical wave tanks for wave energy applications, it can be observed that different flow conditions and different turbulence models are applied during numerical wave energy converter (WEC) experiments. No single turbulence model can be identified as an ‘industry standard’ for WEC modeling. The complexity of the flow field around a WEC, together with the strong dependency of turbulence effects on the shape, operational conditions, and external forces, hampers the formulation of such an ‘industry standard’. Furthermore, the conceptually different flow characteristics (i.e., oscillating, free surface flows), compared to the design cases of most turbulence models (i.e., continuous single-phase flow), can be identified as a source for the potential lack of accuracy of turbulence models for WEC applications. This communication performs a first step towards analyzing the accuracy and necessity of modeling turbulence effects, by means of turbulence models, within CFD-based NWTs for WEC applications. To that end, the influence of turbulence models and, in addition, the influence of the initial turbulence intensity is investigated based on different wave–structure interaction cases considering two separately validated WEC models. The results highlight the complexity of such a ‘turbulence analysis’ and the study suggests specific future work to get a better understanding of the model requirements for the flow field around WECs.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding: This research was funded by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. 13/IA/1886. The research reported in this paper and carried out at BME has been supported by the NRDI Fund (TKP2020 IES, Grant No. BME-IE-WAT) based on the charter of bolster issued by the NRDI Office under the auspices of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 867453. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). Cite as: Windt, C.; Davidson, J.; Ringwood, J.V. Investigation of Turbulence Modeling for Point-Absorber-Type Wave Energy Converters. Energies 2021, 14, 26. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14010026
Keywords:	wave energy; CFD; RANS; turbulence modeling;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Centre for Ocean Energy Research Faculty of Science and Engineering > Electronic Engineering
Item ID:	14343
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3390/en14010026
Depositing User:	Professor John Ringwood
Date Deposited:	14 Apr 2021 16:06
Journal or Publication Title:	Energies
Publisher:	MDPI AG
Refereed:	Yes
Funders:	Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, NRDI Fund, Hungary
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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