Section: Application Domains

Energy conversion

We consider applications in the domain of wind engineering and sea-wave converters. As an example of application of our methods, we show a recent realization where we model a sea-wave energy converter, see figure 1. In this unsteady example, the full interaction between the rigid floater, air and water is described by a monolithic model, the Newton's law, where physical parameters such as densities, viscosities and rigidity vary across the domain. The appropriate boundary conditions are imposed at interfaces that arbitrarily cross the grid using adapted schemes built thanks to geometrical information computed via level set functions  [37]. The background method for fluid structure interface is the volume penalization method  [22] where the level set functions is used to improve the degree of accuracy of the method  [26] and also to follow the object. The simulations are unsteady, three dimensional, with $O\left({10}^8\right)$ grid points on 512 CPUs.

Figure 1. Numerical modeling of a sea-wave converter by a monolithic model and Cartesian meshes.