• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.203-217
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• 2013

A PTO (power-take-off) mechanism by using relative heave motions between a floating buoy and its inner mass (magnet or amateur) is suggested. The inner power take-off system is characterized by a mass with linear stiffness and damping. A vertical truncated cylinder is selected as a buoy and a special station-keeping system is proposed to minimize pitch motions while not affecting heave motions. By numerical examples, it is seen that the maximum power can actually be obtained at the optimal spring and damper condition, as predicted by the developed WEC(wave energy converter) theory. Then, based on the developed theory, several design strategies are proposed to further enhance the maximum PTO, which includes the intentional mismatching among heave natural frequency of the buoy, natural frequency of the inner dynamic system, and peak frequency of input wave spectrum. By using the intentional mismatching strategy, the generated power is actually increased and the required damping value is significantly reduced, which is a big advantage in designing the proposed WEC with practical inner LEG (linear electric generator) system.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.168-174
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• 2022

In a wave power generation system, the overtopping system is known as an overtopping wave energy converter (OWEC). The performance of an OWEC is affected by wave characteristics such as height and period because its power generation system is sensitive to those characteristics; these, as well as wave direction, depend on the sea. As these characteristics vary, it is hard for the OWEC to produce power in a stable manner. Therefore, it is necessary to find an appropriate shape for an OWEC, according to the characteristics of the sea it is in. This research verified the effect of the design of the OWEC ramp on the hydraulic efficiency using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) particle method. A total of 10 models were designed and used in simulations performed by selecting the design parameters of the ramp and changing the attack angle based on those parameters. The hydraulic efficiency was calculated based on the rate of discharged water obtained from the analysis result. The effect of each variable on the overtopping performance according to the shape of the ramp was then confirmed. In this study, we present suggestions for determining the direction for an appropriately shaped OWEC ramp, based on a specific sea area.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.270-279
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• 2022

In this study, numerical analysis and experiments were performed to analyze the viscous damping effect according to the shape of the chamber skirt of the breakwater-linked inclined oscillating water column wave energy converter. Experiments were conducted using a two-dimensional mini wave tank and verified by comparing the results of a computational fluid dynamics numerical analysis. Pointed and rounded skirts were modeled to compare the effect of viscous damping when incident waves enter the chamber, and the difference in the displacement of the water surface in the chamber was compared according to the wave period for the two skirt shapes. The wave elevation in the chamber in the rounded-skirt condition was larger than the pointed-skirt condition in all wave periods, which was approximately 47% greater at 0.9 s of the incident wave period. Therefore, extracting the maximum energy through the optimal orifice is possible while minimizing the energy attenuation in the rounded-skirt condition.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.06a
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• pp.288-291
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• 2007

Since the residential load is an AC load and the output of solar cell is a DC power, the photovoltaic system needs the DC/AC converter to utilize solar cell. In case of driving to interact with utility line, in order to operate at unity power factor, converter must provide the sinusoidal wave current and voltage with same phase of utility line. Since output of solar cell is greatly fluctuated by insolation, it is necessary that the operation of solar cell output in the range of the vicinity of maximum power point. In this paper, DC/AC converter is three phase PWM converter with smoothing reactor. And then, feedforward control used to obtain a superior characteristic for current control and digital PLL circuit used to detect the phase of utility line.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.291-297
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• 2015

The wave spectrum was generated from wave data measured at the Chagwi-do site in Jeju, where a 10MW class floating wave-offshore wind hybrid power generation system will be installed. The latching control technology (Sheng et al.[2015]) was applied in order to improve the extracted power from WEC (Wave Energy Converter), which is heaving in corresponding irregular waves. The peak period as a representative value of irregular waves was used when we determined the latching duration. From the numerical results in the time-domain analysis, the latching control technology can significantly improve the extracted power about 50%.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.53-58
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• 2012

An experimental study on the hydrodynamic performance of a backward bent duct buoy (BBDB) was performed in a 2D wave tank. The BBDB is one of the promising oscillating water column (OWC) types of floating wave energy converters. Two different corner-shaped BBDBs (sharp-corner and round-corner) were used to measure the maximum chamber surface elevations and body motions for various incident wave conditions, and their hydrodynamic characteristics were compared. In order to investigate the effect of the pneumatic pressure inside the chamber, the heave and pitch angle interacted with elevations were compared for both open chamber and partially open chamber BBDBs. From the comparison study, the deviation in the chamber surface elevations between the two shapes of BBDBs was found to be significant near the resonance period, which may be explained by viscous energy loss. It was also found that the pneumatic pressure noticeably affected the chamber surface elevation and body motions.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.600-605
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• 2009

A general purpose viscous flow solver Ansys CFX is used to study a Savonius type wave energy converter in a 3D numerical viscous wave tank. This paper presents the results of a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of the effect of blade configuration on the performance of 3 bladed Savonius rotors for wave energy extraction. A piston-type wave generator was incorporated in the computational domain to generate the desired incident waves. A complete OWC system with a 3-bladed Savonius rotor was modeled in a three dimensional numerical wave tank and the hydrodynamic conversion efficiency was estimated. The flow over the rotors is assumed to be two-dimensional (2D), viscous, turbulent and unsteady. The CFX code is used with a solver of the coupled conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy, with an implicit time scheme and with the adoption of the hexahedral mesh and the moving mesh techniques in areas of moving surfaces. Turbulence is modeled with the k.e model. Simulations were carried out simultaneously for the rotor angle and the helical twist. The results indicate that the developed models are suitable to analyze the water flows both in the chamber and in the turbine. For the turbine, the numerical results of torque were compared for all the cases.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.5-11
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• 2015

Ocean waves have huge amounts of energy, even larger than wind or solar, which can be extracted by some mechanical device. This can be done by creating a system of reacting forces, in which two or more bodies move relative to each other, while at least one body interacts with the waves. This moves the floater up and down. The floaters are connected to an arm structure, which are mounted on a fixed hull structure. Hence, the structure of the floater is very important. A static structural analysis with FSI (Fluid-Structure Interaction) analysis is conducted. To achieve the pressure load for the FSI analysis, the floater is simulated on a wave generator using rigid body motion. The structural analysis is done to examine the stresses on the whole system, and four types of flange and floater are optimized. The result shows that the structure of floater with wood support is the safest.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2017.10a
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• pp.429-432
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• 2017

In this paper, a full - wave rectifying harvesting circuit with a high-performance comparator is designed. Designed circuits are divided into Negative Voltage Converter and Active Diode stages. The comparator included in the active diode stage is implemented as a 3-stage type and divided into pre-amplification, decision circuit, and output buffer stages. The main purpose of this comparator is to reduce the propagation delay and improve the voltage and power efficiency of the harvesting circuit. The proposed circuit is designed with magna $0.35{\mu}m$ CMOS process and its operation is verified by simulation. The chip area of the designed energy harvesting circuit is $900{\mu}m{\times}712{\mu}m$.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.41-47
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• 2014

Experimental results are given for the vertical motion of water in the water chambers for wave energy converter aligned along the wave propagation direction in order to avoid the impulsive wave forces. This paper mainly focuses on the property of the amplitude of the vertical motion of the water surface in the chambers. The amplification has been investigated by dimensionless parameters of wave period to resonance period ratio of the U-shaped oscillation, $T/T_r$, chamber size to wave length ratio, l/L, water depth to wave length ratio, h/L, amplitude of up-down motion of water particles to draft of the front wall ratio, ${\zeta}/D$. It has been shown that l/L should be less than 0.1 and as $T/T_r$ approaches unity the up-down of the water in the chambers is amplified. Also, the structure of the walls which form th water chambers has been examined roughly. It is deduced that the chambers set on both sides of the hull of a single-point moored floating vessel is preferable to those set along a fixed structure such as breakwaters.