| With the rapid growth of global energy consumption, the issues of energy security and environment have become a hot topic. Scientists from various countries are working hard to develop and utilize new energy sources. Ocean energy with its unique charm has attracted many researchers’attention, especially wave energy which is abundant and the limit of time is relatively small. At the same time the energy density is more larger and large energy can be captured by a small device. Therefore, many scientists devised various wave energy absorbing devices, but the devices did not commercialized, which is an urgent problem.Traditional wave energy absorbing device need build a support or foundation structure alone, which greatly increases the cost of investment and limits the scale of the devices. An idea to improve the economical feasibility of wave energy is to build multi-function coastal or ocean engineering buildings, Such as the floating breakwater. It is reasonable to expect that when a wave chain passes wave energy converter, the wave heights will decrease since part of the wave energy is took off by converter. Thus a wave energy converter acts like a breakwater, but rather than simply reflect waves back to the sea, the former absorbs part of wave energy and turns it into electricity. It is not surprise that combining the function of wave converters and breakwaters becomes a viable option. In this paper, we focus on investigation of the performance of floating breakwater double used as a wave energy converter and analyze the structure’s hydrodynamic characteristics.In this paper, a 2-D numerical wave flume based on finite element method and VOF strategy for incompressible viscous flow is established. The influences of the size and the damping coefficient to the wave transmission and wave energy extraction efficiency are discussed. Furthermore, the numerical simulation model was built to study the wave height and wave period to the influence of the buoy’s motion. |
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