Section: New Results

Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter (ISWEC)

The ISWEC is a floater and was design by Wave For Energy (http://www.waveforenergy.com) to extract the energy of typical waves in the Mediterranean Sea. The energy is extracted using a mechanical system based on a gyroscope activated by the motion of the floater generated by sea waves. This is a complex system coupling Fluid/Fluid/structure interfaces, computation of the rigid motion of the floater and computation of the power extraction. The problem is solved using in-house numerical solver (NaSCar) developed in MEMPHIS team. The interfaces are tracked using level se functions. The bi fluid interface is computed using Continuous Surface Force method (CSF), the motion of the floater imposed by penalization is computed using the forces and the torques exerted by the flow, and finally this motion activates the gyroscope for power extraction. The gyroscope model was developed by the Politecnico di Torino. Figure 1 shows a numerical simulation of the iswec (see http://www.math.u-bordeaux1.fr/ mbergman/ for a movie)