EXPERIMENTALLY CALIBRATED TIME-DOMAIN NUMERICAL MODEL FOR A FIXED OWC DEVICE

Oscillating Water Column technology (OWC) is one of the most promising Wave energy Converter (WEC) technologies. Different OWC devices are nowadays under development: fixed or floating, with one or several chambers. The correct under-standing and efficient modelling of the simple problem of a fixed detached OWC is the basis of all of them. For this aim, a com-bined numerical-experimental working methodology has been followed, since it is believed to be the only way to make a real step forward in this field. Due to the high economic and time costs of experimental and field testing, the use of reliable nu-merical models is essential, especially during the early stages of the development. For this purpose, numerical models need to be calibrated and validated based on experimental data, ensuring realistic tools for OWC analysis. Computational Fluid Dynam-ics (CFD) models are widely considered the best way to analyze the dynamics involved in the problem. However, these models are complex and high computational demanding and the accu-racy they offer is not necessary for a first approximation to the problem. Therefore, a simplified and faster time-domain model was built for the first stages of WEC analysis. ∗Address all correspondence to this author