Session: 09-02-03 Wave Energy: WEC Arrays

Paper Number: 120946

120946 - Wave Energy Farm Assessment in Real Wave Climates: The North Sea 

Wave energy has immense potential and can provide at least twice as much electricity as globally produced now due to its high energy density. Apart from the vast accessibility of the resource, waves are more predictable and available throughout the year when compared to other forms of renewable energies. This makes the development and utilization of wave energy technologies immensely important, in order to meet the renewable energy targets, an example of which is the 40GW by 2050 set as the offshore energy strategy of the European Commission. For wave energy to become a commercially viable power source, individual wave energy converters (WECs) need to be deployed in large numbers similar to what can be seen in the wind industry. Therefore, numerical tools simulating multiple interacting devices become highly relevant. This research utilizes the new open-source Boundary Element Method (BEM) based solver HAMS-MREL to analyse the hydrodynamic interactions of mono-array farms of the state-of-the-art Corpower C4 point absorber devices in various configurations subjected to waves in different directions. The obtained responses are used to estimate the power absorbed by the arrays in different configurations to obtain the Array Power Matrices, which can be used to study the variability of the q-factors in different sea states and different directions. Furthermore, the obtained Array Power Matrices are used to estimate the power absorbed by the array configurations in the North Sea. This can be a powerful tool for the analysis of the best wave energy farm configurations as it employs a computationally efficient frequency domain-based solver.  

Presenting Author: Vaibhav Raghavan TU Delft

Presenting Author Biography: PhD researcher on wave energy farms focusing on the hydrodynamic interactions between these devices

Authors:

Vaibhav Raghavan TU Delft
Matias Alday Gonzalez Delft University of Technology
Andrei Metrikine TU Delft
George Lavidas TU Delft