Experimental Study Of A Dual Cylindrical Caisson Embodying A Wave Energy Converter

With rapid global economic development, energy demand is continuously increasing. Faced with exhaustion of regular resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, every country is actively pursuing alternative energy. Marine Energy has shown cheerful prospects for its virtues like clean and renewable, which has been highly valued nowadays.Oscillating Water Column (OWC) converter is a widely used device among all the wave energy converters, as it has simple principle and structure. However, taken its stability and cost-effectiveness into considered, many scholars has proposed that it would be a viable option to combine wave energy converters with breakwaters to amortize the cost of construction and maintenance, which may provide a possible route to commercialization.A dual cylindrical caisson embodying an OWC wave energy converter is proposed in this paper. A series of experiments including 12 cases are carried out to study the wave energy extraction effect and conversion effect of the caisson models with different angles between partition walls, outer diameters of the inner caisson, the lower opening angles and the lower opening heights. Through investigating the synchronous measured data of wave heights inside the chambers and the air pressure on the top opening of the chamber, this paper analyzes the wave energy extraction efficiency for the chamber without a roof and the wave energy conversion efficiency for the chamber with an orifice on top, and discusses the influence of different incident wave parameters, angles between partition walls, outer diameters of inner caisson, the lower opening angles and the lower opening heights on the chamber performance under the action of regular waves.The experimental results showed that the dual cylindrical caisson embodying a wave energy converter has significant conversion effect. With the increasing of chamber volume, the capacity of long period wave utilization can be strengthened; An increasing lower opening angle can boost the chamber working performance:A proper increase of the lower opening height may improve the capacity of short period wave effectively, which can improve the chamber working performance as well. Then based on the experiment and conclusion, the optimized design parameters of the dual cylindrical caisson embodying an OWC device has been proposed.