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A concept of cascading of a fluidic diode for an OWC wave energy converter

Abstract

A  fluidic  diode  (FD)  cascading  concept  was proposed  and  analyzed  to  determine  the  effect  on  the oscillating  water  column  (OWC)  wave  energy  converter performance.  The  FD,  coupled  with  a  twin-turbine,  can improve  energy  conversion.  The  performance  of  the  FD  is given  by  the  diodicity,  which  is  the  ratio  of  pressure  drops. In  this  paper,  the  concept  of cascading  of FD  is  numerically investigated  by  solving  the  three-dimensional  Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations. The commercial computational  fluid  dynamics  (CFD)  tool  ANSYS  FLUENT 16.1  is  used  for  the  present  investigation.  The  present  study showed  that  the  cascading  increased  pressure  drops  in  both directions,  which  reduces the  diodicity compared to the base model.  The  performance  of  the  twin  turbine  with  cascade FD  underperformed  than  the  twin-turbine  without  FD There  are  various  FD  models  proposed  for  various engineering  applications.  For  example,  they  find applications  in  the  nuclear  power  plant,  the  microfluidic, and chemical  industry  where  there  is  a  need  to  prevent  the reverse  flow  [11]. Incident wave Air  turbine model.