A Jacket-Frame Mounted Oscillating Water Column with a Variable Aperture Skirt

During the last decade jacket-frames have emerged as the main kind of substructure for bottom-mounted offshore wind farms in intermediate water depths. With the offshore wind industry moving towards deeper waters, the predominance of jacket-frames is expected to increase in future years. Multipurpose platforms combining wind and wave energy are proposed as an innovative solution to enhance the sustainability of offshore wind energy. In this research, a multipurpose platform is investigated with a novel feature in its oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converter—a variable geometry skirt. A comprehensive physical modelling campaign was carried out using a 1:50 scale model. The performance of the OWC and its interaction with the wave field were investigated under four different skirt aperture angles. It was found that the skirt aperture angle plays a significant role in the capture-width ratio and the pneumatic mean power of the OWC. The best performance was obtained with a skirt aperture angle of 140 deg. More generally, these results prove that the variable-geometry skirt is a promising innovation for hybrid wave-wind systems mounted on jacket-frame substructures.