Abstract
To cope with the warming global environment and the energy crisis, the wave power should occupy the attention of the electric power generation as clean and cool energy resources. There is a fixed oscillating water column (OWC) type as one of the wave energy converter (WEC). An OWC type WEC is composed of a partly submerged wall, an air chamber, an air turbine and a generator and is considered to be safe even under the storm condition. For the practical application of a fixed OWC type WEC, it is necessary to develop a design method which can consider the characteristics of incident wave motion, the motion of the internal free surface affected in the structure such as a partly submerged wall, the fluctuation of air pressure in an air chamber, the rotation of the air turbine. Besides, an impulse turbine as the secondary conversion device in the OWC unit is expected to achieve the high efficiency. In the previous research, the authors investigated the effects of the air chamber length on the primary and secondary conversion efficiencies experimentally. Continuously, in this paper, the 2-D wave tank tests in regular waves for the performance evaluation of the fixed OWC type WEC with the impulse turbine were conducted, and the effects of the impulse rotor inlet/outlet angle, the guide vane's number and the guide vane's setting angle are shown experimentally.