STUDY OF THE EFFECT OF THE RELATIVE HEIGHT ON THE EFFICIENCY OF A SUBMERGED HORIZONTAL PLATE TYPE WAVE ENERGY CONVERTER APPLYING CONSTRUCTAL DESIGN
Flávio Medeiros Seibt1; Liércio André Isoldi2; Elizaldo Domingues dos Santos2; Luiz Alberto Oliveira Rocha3
1 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS); 2 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (FURG); 3 Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS)
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0862
Resumo
The growth on demand for electricity production has led to the diversification of energy matrices and the development of technologies for energy conversion from renewable sources. The energetic potential of the oceans is distributed in different forms and the waves energy stands out by an annual average power available around of 2 TW. The submerged horizontal plate device is a type of structure used in coastal engineering, such as submerged breakwater, for coastal protection purposes and can also be used as a wave energy converter. The use of this structure as a wave energy converter has the main characteristic of the double functionality of the structure, since the same device used for wave energy conversion does not leave to act as a breakwater. The converter utilizes the alternating flow below the plate, which arise by the wave propagation through the structure, as propulsion for a hydraulic turbine. The present numerical work report the constructal design of a submerged horizontal plate device. The aim of this study is to maximize the theoretical device efficiency, which is given by the relationship between the average power available in the flow below the plate and the mean power of the incident wave, for several geometries of the submerged horizontal plate and to analyze the effect of the geometry over the flow below the plate. The model used was 2D and did not consider the presence of the hydraulic turbine. The constructal design method was used in association with the exhaustive search method. The constructal design method was used to define the constraints and objective of the geometric evaluation of the plate. Thus this problem has two constraints: the total area of the wave energy converter structure and the area of the submerged horizontal plate (ϕ = 0.05), and one degree of freedom: h (relative height of the submerged horizontal plate). The total area of the wave energy converter structure was kept fixed in this study. Conservation equations of mass and momentum are solved for all studied cases
Palavras-chave: Computational Fluid Dynamics; Constructal Design; Submerged Horizontal Plate; Volume of Fluid; Wave Energy Converter