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Description
This work presents the development and validation of a hydrodynamic model for a point absorber-type wave energy converter (WEC) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) within the OpenFOAM framework. The study is performed under monochromatic wave conditions and focuses on the heave response of a buoy. A custom Octree-like meshing strategy was implemented through a combination of polyhedral and hexahedral cells, which reduced computational cost while preserving ac- curacy in key flow regions. To minimize spurious reflections at the end of the computational domain, a numerical beach was introduced and calibrated using the three-point method, yielding a reflection index as low as 2.3%. The buoy dynamics were investigated under three control scenarios: without con- trol, with resistive, and reactive control strategies. Potential flow results obtained with the open-source solver Capytaine were used as reference to derive frequency-dependent hydrodynamic coefficients. The CFD outcomes were compared against WEC-Sim predictions, showing consistent agreement with normalized root mean squared errors (nRMSE) below 10% in most cases. These results confirm the robustness of the proposed CFD model and its potential as a complementary tool for the design and analysis of wave energy conversion devices.