CFD analysis of the wave tank at Politecnico di Torino

Wave energy converters (WECs) have a strong potential to contribute to satisfy the increasing global energy demand. Developing e??cient, cost competitive and survivable WECs is the focus of research and development efforts from both industry and academia in recent decades, and has proven to be a challenging task. An essential development trajectory to an economically competitive WEC, requires early stage optimization and re nement of the device design and operation using numerical tools, before considering expensive physical prototype construction, deployment and experimentation. For the research and development of wave energy converters (WECs), numerical wave tanks (NWTs) provide an excellent numerical tool, enabling a cost-effective testbed for WEC experimentation, analysis and optimization. Different methods for simulating the fluid dynamics and fluid structure interaction within the NWT have been developed over the years, with increasing levels of delity, and associated computational expense. In the past, the high computational requirements largely precluded Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) from being applied to WEC analysis. However, the continual improvement and availability of high-performance computing has led to the steady increase of CFD-based NWTs (CNWT) for WEC experiments. In the present work, a NWT is established within a full-scale physical wave tank, which is located at Politecnico di Torino. Commercial CFD code, STARCCM+, is used to model the NWT. The waves in the NWT are generated using a flap type wave-maker which is located at the inlet of the domain. The CFD code solves the RANS equations, k-omega turbulence model is selected and the free surface is captured using VOF method. Firstly, the numerical code to generate waves in NWT is validated against theoretical solutions, obtained from linear wave theory, to check the accuracy and robustness of the code. Within this framework, after a fi rst introduction about what CFD is and its importance and the description of the state of the art, CFD analysis is introduced in more detail. Furthermore, a description of the simulation setups was carried out, with particular focus on physical models and computational tools that have been used. Finally, results are discussed.