Experimental and numerical investigations of a two-body floating-point absorber wave energy converter in regular waves

Abstract This paper presents experimental and numerical studies on the hydrodynamics of a two-body floating-point absorber (FPA) wave energy converter (WEC) under both extreme and operational wave conditions. In this study, the responses of the WEC in heave, surge, and pitch were evaluated for various regular wave conditions. For extreme condition analysis, we assume the FPA system has a survival mode that locks the power-take-off (PTO) mechanism in extreme waves, and the WEC moves as a single body in this scenario. A series of Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations was performed for the survival condition analysis, and the results were validated with the measurements from exper…