On the Efficiency of Oscillating Water Column (OWC) Devices in Converting Ocean Wave Energy to Electricity Under Weakly Nonlinear Waves

Oscillating Water Column (OWC) devices are regarded as one of the most promising systems developed to harness ocean wave energy. In this paper, we present some preliminary results of our most recent effort in the research of trying to improve the efficiency of OWCs with a focus on the comparison of incident waves being in the linear and weekly nonlinear regimes. As the results show, the counted-in nonlinearity at the second order could contribute to more than a 50% increase in the maximum mean power output.