Research On The Mathematical Model And Solution Method Of Energy Conversion For Flexible Wave Energy Devices

Floating wave energy converter is a crucial type of device for developing and utilizing wave energy.Traditional wave energy converters customarily adopt rigid structures,which are sophisticated in structure and poor in reliability.Flexible wave energy converters typically have simple structures and good reliability,which broadly become a research hotspot.The current theoretical research on such devices predominantly focuses on the energy conversion problem and hydrodynamic calculation problem separately,which makes it arduous to accurately simulate the dynamic characteristics of the system.In the cause of solving this problem,a flexible plate wave energy converter is systematically studied in this paper,and the coupling mathematical model of wave-electromechanical system is established to simulate the response of the device.The main work of the paper is indicated as below:First,based on the motion equation of thin plate bending under force and the piezoelectric equation of piezoelectric materials caused by piezoelectric effect,not only a mechanical and electrical system model of the flexible plate wave energy converter is established,but also the wave force is used to represent the load on the flexible plate as well.A coupled mathematical model of the wave-electromechanical system and an energy conversion model are established.Second,for the hydrodynamic calculation of the flexible plate wave energy converter,the fluid domain is divided based on the two-dimensional linear potential flow theory,the boundary value model satisfied by the velocity potential equation is set up to use the continuity condition of the velocity potential equation,and the semi-analytical solution of the established model is derived based on the separation of variables method and the eigenfunction expansion method.Finally,the numerical method is proficient in solving the established model,and the Newton’s method is used to expand the variables one by one for actual calculation,with the intention of obtaining the root of the coupling model under the conditions of specific water depth,wave period,incident wave amplitude and basic parameters of the device.As a consequence,the wave amplitude coefficient acting on the flexible plate is obtained,and all unknown quantities required to calculate the energy output power of the converter are obtained.Subsequently Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization are used to optimize the dissipative term that affects the power generation efficiency of the converter.The influence of different parameters on the energy conversion efficiency is analyzed.Furthermore,the optimal parameter combination is determined.