Flap gate farm: From Venice lagoon defense to resonating wave energy production. Part 2: Synchronous response to incident waves in open sea

Abstract

We consider a flap gate farm, i.e. a series of P arrays, each made of Q neighbouring flap gates, in an open sea of constant depth, forced by monochromatic incident waves. The effect of the gate thickness on the dynamics of the system is taken into account. By means of Green's theorem a system of hypersingular integral equations for the velocity potential in the fluid domain is solved in terms of Legendre polynomials. We show that synchronous excitation of the natural frequencies of Sammarco et al. (2013) yields large amplitude response of gate motion. This aspect is fundamental for the optimisation of the gate farm for energy production.