Abstract
The integration of wave energy devices with floating marine structures (such as breakwaters, offshore wind turbines, offshore platforms, and aquaculture systems) offers advantages in terms of spatial sharing, cost sharing, and multifunctionality, providing a promising approach for reducing the cost of marine energy devices. This integrated solution can form multi-purpose platforms, offering space and facilitating cost sharing, which can promote the engineering application of wave energy devices (Clemente et al. in Energy Convers Manage 224, 2020). Furthermore, the integration of different marine structures can create synergistic effects. For example, the integration of wave energy devices with floating breakwaters can produce a synergistic effect, where the wave energy devices capture wave energy while also contributing to wave attenuation. Simultaneously, the presence of the floating breakwater can generate wave focusing effects, which positively impact the power extraction performance of the wave energy devices. In this chapter, we conduct a numerical investigation into the hydrodynamic performance of a floating platform coupled with an array of wave energy devices. An efficient numerical framework tailored for predicting the dynamics of the floating integrated system is developed within the context of potential flow theory.