The development of marine floating photovoltaics represents a novel and promising direction in the advancement of clean energy technologies. The hydrodynamic analysis of these systems, particularly in nearshore shallow water environments, demands specialized consideration to ensure the efficiency and accuracy. In this study, a hybrid method is developed for the nearshore marine floating photovoltaics. This method incorporates the influence of non-horizontal topography on waves into the hydrodynamic analysis of marine floating photovoltaics by dividing the computational domain into the inner and outer regions. Comparisons of the numerical results with the two common approaches demonstrate the necessity and feasibility of the hybrid method, revealing the significant increase in low-frequency wave excitation forces attributed to the energy shift in the peak frequency of irregular waves towards lower frequencies after traversing slope topography.
Carbon dioxide from the combustion of conventional fossil energy sources exacerbates the Earth's greenhouse effect and emits numerous harmful gases that have the potential to impact human health and the functioning of the ecosphere. Therefore, the development of renewable and clean energy has become an inevitable trend. The first solar cell was manufactured by Charles Fritts in 1883 based on a selenium semiconductor with an energy conversion efficiency of only 1%. Since 1954, when scientists at Bell Labs invented silicon-based photovoltaic (PV) modules with the potential for practical application, this technique of directly converts solar radiation directly into electricity, has developed considerably over the past several decades. Based on photovoltaic technology, solar energy has become the world's second largest source of clean energy after hydropower. China is the world's largest country in terms of total installed photovoltaic capacity, reaching 536 GW as of October 2023. Compared to traditional onshore photovoltaic systems that consume significant amounts of land resources, the concept of floating photovoltaics (FPV) has emerged in recent years, with some of demonstration projects being carried out around the world, especially in Europe and China (Deveci et al., 2022). FPVs are installed in environments such as reservoirs, lakes, and oceans. Compared to onshore PV power farms, FPV have numerous advantages, such as saving land resources (Pouran et al., 2022), increasing electricity generation efficiency due to the cooling effect of water bodies (Kakoulaki et al., 2023), and experiencing fewer dust (Bajc and Kostadinović, 2023) and shading (Gorjian et al., 2021) effects.
