A Novel Type of Wave Energy Converter with Five Degrees of Freedom and Preliminary Investigations on Power-Generating Capacity

Abstract

In order to further improve the power-generating capacity of the wave energy converter (WEC) of oscillating buoy type, this paper puts forward a novel type where the WEC can move and extract power in five degrees of freedom. We make a detailed hydrodynamic analysis of such WECs. Each buoy is modeled as a floating truncated cylinder with five degrees of freedom: surge, sway, heave, roll, and pitch, and there are relative motions among buoys in the array. Linear power take-off (PTO) characteristics are considered for simplicity. Under the linear wave theory, a semi-analytical method based on the eigenfunction expansion and Graf’s addition theorem for Bessel functions is proposed to analyze the hydrodynamic interactions among the WEC array under the action of incident waves, and the amplitude response and power extraction of the WEC array are then solved. After verifying the accuracy of hydrodynamic analysis and calculation, we make preliminary case studies, successively investigating the power-generating capacity of a single WEC, an array of two WECs, and an array of five WEC; then, we compare their results with the conventional heaving WECs. The results show that the WEC with five degrees of freedom can significantly improve the power extraction performance.