Nonlinear analysis of an actuated seafloor-mounted carpet for a high-performance wave energy extraction

Abstract

It is known that muddy seafloors can extract significant energy from overpassing surface waves via engaging them in strong interaction processes. If a synthetic seabed can respond to the action of surface gravity waves similar to the mud response, then it too can take out a lot of energy from surface waves. Analysis of the performance of a mud-resembling seabed carpet in harvesting ocean wave energy is the subject of this article. Specifically, and on the basis of the field measurements and observations of properties/responses of seafloor mud, we focus our attention on an artificial viscoelastic seabed carpet composed of (vertically acting) linear springs and generators. We show that the system of sea/synthetic-carpet admits two propagating wave solutions: the surface mode and the bottom mode. The damping of a surface-mode wave is proportional to its wavelength and hence is classic. However, the damping of a bottom-mode wave is larger for shorter waves, and is in general stronger than that of the surface-mode wave. To address the effect of (high-order) nonlinear interactions as well as to investigate the performance of our proposed carpet of wave energy conversion (CWEC) against a spectrum of waves, we formulate a direct simulation scheme based on a high-order spectral method. We show, by taking high-order nonlinear interactions into account, that the CWEC efficiency can be significantly higher for steeper waves. We further show that the bandwidth of high performance of the CWEC is broad, it yields minimal wave reflections and its theoretical efficiency asymptotically approaches unity within a finite and (relatively) short extent of deployment.