Assessment of the power available in a fixed offshore oscillating water column plant

The early effects of the global warming can be observed and people around the world are beginning to realize the seriousness of the situation. Reducing the CO2 emissions produced by fossil energy seems to be one of the main worldwide technological challenges at the time of writing. Hence, since the oil crisis in the 70s, a growing interest in renewable energies has been noticed. In Europe, the European Commission fixed a target: to produce 20% of the EU energy from renewable sources by 2020. Similar initiatives, in varying degrees, are being considered around the globe. Among all the renewable energy technologies currently on the market, the ocean energy industry is still at an early stage, despite investigations that have been carried out on both tidal and wave energy devices over the past 40 years. The subject of this thesis focuses on one of the wave energy devices: the Oscillating Water Column. The information found in the literature about this type of plants is mainly about onshore and floating offshore OWCs. Very little information about fixed offshore OWC is available. Besides, the availability of large numbers of fixed offshore structures installed in the world oceans suggests that many of these could possibly host an OWC plant. Hence, the present study investigated a fixed offshore OWC. The aim of this thesis is to assess the power available in a fixed offshore OWC plant. To illustrate the procedure of power assessment, the fictional scenario of a platform located in the Santa Maria sea region, off the coast of Californian, is introduced. This work intends to develop a methodology to study the feasibility of such installation and estimate the power extractable through various complementary approaches. From a theoretical approach based on the wave climate of Santa Maria to wave tank experiments with various geometries and shapes of chamber (cylinder and bent duct buoy in frontward and backward position), the viability of a fixed offshore OWC plant is demonstrated for the chosen location. Results highlight the performance of the Backward Bent Duct Buoy (BBDB) for the Santa Maria characteristic sea conditions. With the intention of completing the study with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis, numerical investigations about the implementation of an alternative method to generate regular waves demonstrates better results of wave propagation than the common wave generation method based on Linear Wave Theory previously used at Cranfield University. In the conclusion, the work achievements and recommendations for future CFD investigations to reproduce the wave tank experiments are discussed.