Hydrodynamic performance of a fixed U-shaped Oscillating Water Column (U-OWC) Wave Energy Converter is numerically investigated. Based on the timedomain higher-order boundary element method (HOBEM), a two-dimensional fully nonlinear numerical model is implemented to simulate the nonlinear wave interaction with a U-OWC device. In the model, the inner-domain-source method is adopted to generate the incident waves and a linear pneumatic model is used to determine the air pressure which is imposed on the free surface inside the chamber. The numerical model is well validated against the published experimental data of the free surface elevation at the chamber center, air pressure inside the chamber and hydrodynamic efficiency.

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Based on the concept of cost sharing, an oscillating buoy wave energy converter-floating breakwater integrated system is proposed, in which the surge or pitch motion of the front-pontoon equipped with Power Take-off (PTO) system is allowed. In this study, the methods of eigenfunction matching and variables separation are applied to establish a theoretical model on hydrodynamic performance of the proposed integrated system. Under the condition of optimal PTO damping, the effects of the front-pontoon width, draft and pontoon spacing on the capture width ratio, reflection coefficient and transmission coefficient are investigated, respectively. It is found that the integrated system with surging front-pontoon performs better on the wave energy conversion than that with pitching one, especially in the high frequency region. The peaks of capture width ratio C w are associated with the gap resonance and the increase of front-pontoon motion induced by the 'hydrodynamic constructive effect'.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.