Abstract
As the energy demand increases with the constantly increasing population, as well as the effort to replace conventional fossil fuels with cleaner sources of energy, ocean energy has emerged as a potential global resource. The ocean contains an enormous amount of energy that has not been exploited yet, although efforts have augmented during the past decades.
The overall purpose of this research is to design, model, and analyze, a wave energy converter (WEC) prototype to contribute to the current research in this field. This particular work represents the first stage of the research process in which the ultimate goal is to introduce a WEC prototype that can overcome previous challenges, and/or improve energy harnessing from previous models.
The focus of this paper is to study previous wave energy systems, both successful and unsuccessful, investigate what has been done up to date, and perform a numerical model analysis of two different body shapes and at two different water depths. Also, a local case study of ocean wave’s conditions is performed. The objective is to compute the design parameters of the working environment and to analyze both numerical models, so that a small-scale model of the prototype can be implemented in the next phase of this research and tested experimentally.