Development of a composite sea wall wave energy converter system

The cost-effective utilization of wave energy is still a major engineering challenge. Shoreline locations for Wave Energy Converters (WECs) offer lower wave energy densities when compared with offshore locations, but give significant advantages from the points of view of construction, maintenance and grid connection. This article provides a first analysis on the viability of a very low-head hydropower plant, in which waves accumulate water into a shoreline reservoir created by a steep detached ramp. The system is particularly suitable for micro-tidal environments such as the Mediterranean Sea and has the additional advantage of protecting shorelines, seawalls and coastal assets from wave action. Physical model tests, conducted with regular waves, have been used to get a preliminary estimate of the average water flux overtopping the ramp in a sea state; a novel low-head hydropower machine, developed at Southampton University, has been considered for the conversion of the hydraulic energy into electricity. The site of Porto Alabe, located along the West coast of Sardinia (Italy), has been chosen as a first case study. Based on the inshore wave climate, the layout of the ramp has been designed as a tradeoff between the needs of maximizing the energy production, providing the coastal area with an adequate protection and making the plant a desirable investment to either private or public players. The results are interesting both from a technical and an economic point of views and encourage a further deepening on the response of this kind of WEC

Performance-based assessment of onshore structures due to initial tsunami impact : a preliminary investigation

The Tohuku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 illustrated a greater vulnerability of onshore structures to tsunami loads than to those experienced during the earthquake. This is unsurprising when one considers that Earthquake Engineering is a more established field than Tsunami Engineering. It is because of this disparity that this paper aims to show how the gap can be bridged between these inter-related fields of engineering. This was accomplished by measuring initial tsunami impact loads in the laboratory and using them to estimate resultant structural displacements and determine the extent of damage by standard Earthquake Engineering practices. By doing this, it is hoped that future researchers will further explore the notion of utilizing Earthquake Engineering techniques to improve Tsunami Engineering

Experimental evidence of the influence of recurves on wave loads at vertical seawalls

The role of recurves on top of seawalls in reducing overtopping has been previously shown but their influence in the distribution and magnitude of wave-induced pressures and forces on the seawall remains largely unexplored. This paper deals with the effects of different recurve geometries on the loads acting on the vertical wall. Three geometries with different arc lengths, or extremity angles (αe), were investigated in large-scale physical model tests with regular waves, resulting in a range of pulsating (non-breaking waves) to impulsive (breaking waves) conditions at the structure. As the waves hit the seawall, the up-rushing flow is deflected seawards by the recurve and eventually, re-enters the underlying water column and interacts with the next incoming wave. The re-entering water mass is, intuitively, expected to alter the incident waves but it was found that the recurve shape does not affect wave heights significantly. For purely pulsating conditions, the influence of αe on peak pressures and forces was also negligible. In marked contrast, the mean of the maximum impulsive pressure and force peaks increased, even by a factor of more than two, with the extremity angle. While there is no clear relation between the shape of the recurve and the mean peak pressures and forces, interestingly the mean of the 10% highest forces increases gradually with αe and this effect becomes more pronounced with increasing impact intensity

Numerical models for evolution of extreme wave groups

The paper considers the application of two numerical models to simulate the evolution of steep breaking waves. The first one is a Lagrangian wave model based on equations of motion of an inviscid fluid in Lagrangian coordinates. A method for treating spilling breaking is introduced and includes dissipative suppression of the breaker and correction of crest shape to improve the post breaking behaviour. The model is used to create a Lagrangian numerical wave tank, to reproduce experimental results of wave group evolution. The same set of experiments is modelled using a novel VoF numerical wave tank created using OpenFOAM. Lagrangian numerical results are validated against experiments and VoF computations and good agreement is demonstrated. Differences are observed only for a small region around the breaking crest

Experimental set-up and calibration errors for mapping wave-breaking pressures on marine structures

Capturing the detailed spatial variation of pressures induced by breaking waves on physical model structures has become possible using a high resolution mapping system. It can provide data with 4 measuring points/cm2, whereas the denser pressure measurements reported so far, for wave-structure interaction experiments, were limited to 0.4 pressure transducers/cm2. The paper explores the main parameters affecting the accuracy and errors of pressure data induced by laboratory set-up and system calibration. The quality of pressure maps deteriorates due to cushioning effects associated to air trapped in the sensor during manufacturing. The sensor's response is also shown to depend on the loading conditions. Non-calibrated outputs returned for impact pressures induced by impinging water-jets are more than three times smaller than the outputs recorded for static pressures, and/or for pressures developed when a material less compliant than water comes forcibly in contact with the sensor. Therefore, the calibration settings must be similar to the conditions anticipated in the experiments. To this end, a set-up and calibration methodology, designed specifically for hydraulic model tests with waves breaking on structures, are proposed and discussed in the paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Numerical modelling of oil containment process under current and waves

This study presents a novel three-phase Fluid–Structure Interaction (FSI) model for simulating the containment of oil spills. The model uses Level Sets to capture the evolution of multiple interfaces and incorporates spring forces on the structure under hybrid wave–current boundary conditions. The implementation of spring forces has been validated through simple harmonic motion models and a wedge falling simulation demonstrates the model’s ability to handle multi-phase deformation. The study compares numerical results with experimental data to study the response of oil spills to wave–current hybrid conditions. Our simulations reveal that when the current exceeds 0.2 m/s, the movement of the boom is dominated by the current and not by the waves or their inertia, providing important information for the design of effective oil spill containment systems

The loading on a vertical cylinder in steep and breaking waves on sheared currents using smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Waves and currents coexist in a wide range of natural locations for the deployment of offshore structures and devices. This combined wave–current environment largely determines the loading of vertical surface piercing cylinders, which are the foundations typically used for offshore wind turbines along with many other offshore structures. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code DualSPHysics is used to simulate focused waves on sheared currents and assess subsequent loading on a vertical cylinder. Outputs from another numerical model are used to define the SPH inlet–outlet boundary conditions to generate the wave–current combinations. A modified damping zone is used to damp the waves, but allow the currents to exit the domain. Numerical results are validated against experimental measurements for surface elevation and associated loading on the cylinder. Four phase repeats are used in the SPH model to understand the harmonic structure of the surface elevation at the front face of the cylinder and associated loading. It is shown that the SPH model provides agreement with experimental measurements of harmonic components for both force and elevations. Taking advantage of the SPH method, wave amplitudes were increased up to, and beyond, the breaking threshold highlighting a complex relationship between peak force and wave phase, requiring detailed investigation. The numerical modeling of interactions of steep and breaking waves on sheared currents with the cylinder demonstrates the SPH model's capability for modeling highly nonlinear fluid–structure interaction problems

Study of dam break flow interaction with urban settlements over a sloping channel

This paper describes a dam break experiment on a sloped channel, carried out in a hydraulic flume at UCL for the purpose of computer model validations of extreme events, such as flash floods. An elevated reservoir was situated upstream followed by a 1/20 slope leading up to a flat floodplain. Plexiglas blocks were positioned on the floodplain constituting different urban settlements and creating different obstructions to the flow. The flume was instrumented along its length measuring the change in water depth in the reservoir; the water depth time histories in various locations; the flow patterns and flood front velocity; and lastly the pressure and load on the buildings. The experiments were repeated for different urban settlements, flood intensities (two different initial water depths in the reservoir) and roughness layers along the slope, representative of a vegetated and a non-vegetated hill. In the present study, the experimental results were described qualitatively and compared with theoretical processes and 2D numerical results obtained using OpenFOAM's RAS turbulent model. Water depth, velocity and load measurements were analysed for different cases and it was found that while the 2D model provided a good fit on the slope, the flows generated around the building were more complex 3D formations which lead to inaccuracies. All experiments were repeated multiple times to ensure repeatability and thus the procedure was validated successfully providing a complete dataset that can be used for the validation of computational models for extreme events

Ship resistance when operating in floating ice floes: a combined CFD&DEM approach

Whilst climate change is transforming the Arctic into a navigable ocean where small ice floes are floating on the sea surface, the effect of such ice conditions on ship performance has yet to be understood. The present work combines a set of numerical methods to simulate the ship-wave-ice interaction in such ice conditions. Particularly, Computational Fluid Dynamics is applied to provide fluid solutions for the floes and it is incorporated with the Discrete Element Method to govern ice motions and account for ship-ice/ice-ice collisions, by which, the proposed approach innovatively includes wave effects in the interaction. In addition, this work introduces two algorithms that can implement computational models with natural ice-floe fields, which takes randomness into consideration thus achieving high-fidelity modelling of the problem. Following validation against experiments, the model is shown accurate in predicting the ice-floe resistance of a ship, and then a series of simulations are performed to investigate how the resistance is influenced by ship speed, ice concentration, ice thickness and floe diameter. This paper presents a useful approach that can provide power estimates for Arctic shipping and has the potential to facilitate other polar engineering purposes.Comment: 26 pages 18 figures, submitted journal pape

Experimental Study of Dispersion and Modulational Instability of Surface Gravity Waves on Constant Vorticity Currents

This paper examines experimentally the dispersion and stability of weakly nonlinear waves on opposing linearly vertically sheared current profiles (with constant vorticity). Measurements are compared against predictions from the unidirectional (1D + 1) constant vorticity nonlinear Schrödinger equation (the vor-NLSE) derived by Thomas et al. (Phys. Fluids, vol. 24, no. 12, 2012, 127102). The shear rate is negative in opposing currents when the magnitude of the current in the laboratory reference frame is negative (i.e. opposing the direction of wave propagation) and reduces with depth, as is most commonly encountered in nature. Compared to a uniform current with the same surface velocity, negative shear has the effect of increasing wavelength and enhancing stability. In experiments with a regular low-steepness wave, the dispersion relationship between wavelength and frequency is examined on five opposing current profiles with shear rates from 0 to −0.87 s−1. For all current profiles, the linear constant vorticity dispersion relation predicts the wavenumber to within the 95 % confidence bounds associated with estimates of shear rate and surface current velocity. The effect of shear on modulational instability was determined by the spectral evolution of a carrier wave seeded with spectral sidebands on opposing current profiles with shear rates between 0 and −0.48 s−1. Numerical solutions of the vor-NLSE are consistently found to predict sideband growth to within two standard deviations across repeated experiments, performing considerably better than its uniform-current NLSE counterpart. Similarly, the amplification of experimental wave envelopes is predicted well by numerical solutions of the vor-NLSE, and significantly over-predicted by the uniform-current NLSE