STUDY ON ENERGY CONVERSION EFFICIENCY OF WAVE ACTUATING SHIP

Abstract

Wave-powered vessels are a type of vehicle that has been introduced for decades. Compared with conventional vessels, it has apparent advantages, such as harnessing wave energy to propel the ship, supporting the primary propulsion device, and optimizing the ship's hull design. This study presents a new concept of the wave actuator for ship propulsion. The wave actuator efficiently converts the hydraulic force of the wave surge force to the ship into thrusting forces. In the thesis, the modeling of the wave actuator was studied. For this, the hydrodynamical modeling of the new wave actuator is presented through an analysis of the structure of the wave actuator. Also, ship motion excited by wave forces is studied. Based on the modeling of the wave actuator, analyses of the energy conversion capacity of the wave actuator were performed. To validate the good performance of the proposed wave actuator, numerous computer simulations were performed in several sea environments using Matlab. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are used for the hydrodynamic analysis of ships. The simulation results show that the cruise speed of the ship is exploited very efficiently by the wave energy absorption system.