Numerical Evaluation of Hydropneumatic Power for Two Oscillating Water Column (OWC) Devices Coupled Using Constructal Design
Yuri Theodoro Barbosa de Lima1; Luiz Alberto Oliveira Rocha1; Mateus das Neves Gomes2; Liércio André Isoldi3; Elizaldo Domingues dos Santos3
1 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; 2 Instituto Federal do Paraná-Campus Paranaguá; 3 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0231
Resumo
Energy is totally inserted in people's daily lives. Considering the growth of the world population, the tendency is to occur an increase in the energy demand. To attend this need, the attention is focused on called clean or renewable sources of energy. The oceans reserve a great energetic resource in the form of waves, the conversion of the wave energy into electrical energy shows itself as an important alternative in the search of new energetic resources. The present work presents a two dimensional numerical study on the hydropneumatic power and geometry of two Oscillating Water Column (OWC) devices coupled. The Constructal Design method associated to the exhaustive search method is used to geometrically optimize the coupled OWC devices. The objective is to maximize hydropneumatic power considering different combinations of heights and length for the hydropneumatic chambers of the converting devices. The problem restrictions are the input volume of the first positioned device (VE1), the input volume of the second device (VE2), the total volume of the first device (VT1) and the total volume of the second device (VT2). The degrees of freedom considered were: H1/L1 (ratio between height and length of the hydropneumatic chamber of the first device), H2/L2 (ratio between height and length of the hydropneumatic chamber of the second device), H4/l1 (ratio between height and length of the chimney of the first device), H5/l2 (ratio between height and length of the chimney of the second device) and H6 (depth of immersion of the devices). However, in the present study, H4/l1, H5/l2 and H6 were kept constant, being evaluated only the influence of degrees of freedom H1/L1 and H2/L2. For the numerical solution, a computational fluid dynamics code based on the Finite Volume Method (FVM) is applied. The multiphase model, Volume of Fluid (VOF), is applied in the treatment of water-air interaction. The results demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a relation between the heights of the hydropneumatic chambers (H1, H2) and thei
Palavras-chave: Constructal Design; OWC Coupled; Wave Energy