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Ocean Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/oceaneng
Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK
Lancaster University, Engineering Department, Renewable Energy Group, Faculty of Science and Technology, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK
art ic l e i nf o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 11 June 2015
Received in revised form
4 November 2015
Accepted 15 November 2015
This paper examines the optimum power output of a pitching-surge point absorber wave energy converter in irregular wave climates. A mathematical model based on frequency domain is used as the rst
step to estimate the hydrodynamic parameters of the device and its potential power output in realistic
sea waves. The numerical results predict that the point absorber energy converter has the potential to
absorb more energy than what is contained in its own geometrical width. The optimum power of the
device is then obtained from wave tank experiments in irregular wave climates. The comparison of
numerical and experimental results demonstrates that the frequency domain method based on linear
theory will lead to an overestimation of the energy absorption for this device. The frequency domain
method provides an upper estimate for wave energy absorption due to the non-linear, viscous effects and
constrained amplitude of device oscillation. However, comparison of the performance of the device with
other point absorber wave energy converters shows that this wave energy converter is one of the most
efcient in terms of absorbing wave energy.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Wave energy converter
Point absorber
Irregular waves
Capture width ratio
1. Introduction
The oil crisis of 1973 led to a period of high energy prices which
intensied interest in renewable energies such as large-scale
energy production from the sea waves. One of the earliest works
in the UK was a paper published in Nature by Salter (1974) which
brought the feasibility of wave energy conversion to the attention
of the international scientic community. Research into wave
energy started at Lancaster University in the mid-1970s, mainly
concentrating on the invention and development of wave energy
converters (WECs) at model scale, along with generic work on the
theory and systematic design of WECs. This has led to the great
understanding of the theory and systematic prototype design of
WECs (French and Bracewell, 1985; Chaplin and Folley, 1998). One
of the earliest WECs was Lancaster exible bag invented by
Michael French at Lancaster University which was subsequently
developed by Wave power limited in the UK (Platts, 1981). By the
early 1980s, the period of high energy prices was ended and
consequently the economic and political climate in which WECs
were being developed had changed drastically from that in the
mid to late 1970s. Nevertheless, research devoted to wave energy
converters for the production of electricity continued but a greater
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: mt.rahmati@brunel.ac.uk (M.T. Rahmati).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2015.11.011
0029-8018/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Pd
Pw
where Pd is the device power and Pw is the wave power per meter.
484
q
l
m
m0
F
S.W.L
WEC
CW
cw
Nomenclature
a55
b55
c55
F1
Hm0
hcm
IQ
G
P
p
Q
Im
The capture width ratio, cw, is a better parameter as it is a nondimensional parameter which best reects the hydrodynamic
performance of various WECs. Capture width ratio reects the
fraction of wave power owing through the device that is absorbed by the device and dened by:
cw
Cw
W
efcient numerical approach capable of capturing the major features of interest while reducing the solution time to an acceptable
level for use in routine design.
One of the widely used boundary-element method package has
been WAMIT. An assessment of this package for modeling a freeoating sloped wave energy device, developed at Edinburgh University, was reported by Payne et al. (2008a,b). Although there are
signicant discrepancies between numerical computations and
experimental measurements of the capture width, the agreement
is generally good enough, to provide a rst assessment of the
performance of the WEC. They suggested that the validity of linear
boundary-element method for this kind of wave energy converter
is case specic. Recently Zurkinden et al (2014) provided an
assessment of WAMIT for the prototype of a point absorber OWEC.
The laboratory device developed at Aalborg University is similar to
the Wavestar oat which is located in the Danish North Sea. It was
shown that the linear assumption is a good approximation of the
physical model of the device. In particular, the capture width
predicted using the linear numerical methods agrees well with the
experimental capture width.
This paper brings together the latest developments in analyzing numerical and experimental capture width of WRSPA (Rahmati
et al., 2008a,b) which is a xed OWEC operating in surge and pitch
mode. A 1:100 scale model of the device was developed. A brief
description of the model and its dimension is given in the next
section; this is followed by the numerical power estimation and
the results of wave tank tests on the scaled model in irregular
waves. The experimental results are provided to serve two purposes: the rst is to evaluate the actual optimum power of the
device in irregular waves; the second is to verify the capability of
the numerical method in predicting the optimum power of the
device.
485
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the dynamics of WRASPA, the device moves back and forth with movement of waves. (a) Backward movement. (b) Forward movement.
486
where the superscript * denotes complex conjugation. The performance of the model in regular wave has already been studied
both numerically and experimentally (Rahmati et al., 2008a,b).
Here, the performance of this WEC in irregular wave is
investigated.
As mentioned by (French, 2006) broadly speaking, the main
challenge in developing economical WECs is how to deal with
large forces moving slowly efciently. This suggests two criteria for
an economical WEC: a large working area relative to its size and a
high ratio of the speed of that surface to the particle speed of the
wave. Regarding the rst criterion Budal and Falnes (1978)
demonstrated the advantages of point absorbers in terms of ratio
of working surface to total area. While there are some very large
WECs, Point absorber WECs are relatively small compare to the
most common wavelengths and have the potential for more efcient power conversation in terms of output per unit volume
(McCabe et al., 2010). The second criterion indicates a resonant
system, and this paper is conned to WRASPA that have quasiresonant working surfaces. The system will be quasi-resonant
because the mechanics involved is not quite that of classical
resonance (French, 2006). However these devices tend to have
natural frequency responses of narrow bandwidth due to relatively small size, only achieving high efciency when excited by
waves with a frequency around their resonance point. In regular
(sinusoidal) waves optimum power output is obtained when the
motion of the device is controlled so that the phase and amplitude
of oscillation have specic optimum values, known as tuning the
device. As for any WEC, the requirement of keeping the device in
resonance, critical to economical power capture, involves continuous tuning. The optimization problem of maximizing the
absorbed wave power in sea waves is more complicated as they
are not sinusoidal. It is necessary to apply control-engineering
techniques in order to optimize the oscillation for maximizing the
absorbed power or the converted useful power. This requires
knowledge of the spectrum wave and of the optimum oscillation
(Falnes, 2002).
487
q p2 jF 1 j2 2
8 b55
488
Fig. 12. The relative excitation moment magnitude at angular frequency 6.28 rad/s.
Q H 2m0 f
4
5
h
i
4
exp Q f
where
4
Tp
Q
1:057
12
13
in which Tp is the peak period, the reciprocal of the peak frequency, fp, of the spectrum. A spectral moment is dened as
Z 1
n
f Sf df
14
mn
0
Fig. 13. The relative excitation moment phase at angular frequency 6.28 rad/s.
N
X
f k cos 2 f k t k
k1
and the corresponding energy and zero-crossing periods and signicant wave height can be expressed in terms of the spectral
p
moments as: T e m 1 =m0 , T z m2 =m0 , and H m0 4 m0 ,
respectively.
Irregular waves are often dened by their energy period, T e ,
and signicant wave height (here using the spectral moment
denition), H m0 . The equivalent regular wave, in terms of energy
p
capacity, has frequency, f e ( 1=T e ), and amplitude H m0 =2 2.
In sea-state tuning control, the control force and moment is
derived for a xed tuning frequency, f T , The mean power output in
an irregular wave with a spectral density function Sf , is
2
Z 1
b55 f q pf F 1 f 2 Sf
P IN
df
15
2
0
Zf Z f T
The estimated rst-order power spectra depicted in Fig. 14 are
for the tank model in a Bretschneider spectrum wave with signicant wave height, H m0 0.033 m, zero-crossing period, T z .96
second. There are three tuning frequencies, corresponding to the
reciprocals of the zero-crossing period, T z , the energy period,
T e 1.02 seconds, and the spectrum peak period, T p 1.0 seconds.
The enveloping curve is the optimum mean power spectrum.
The values of mean power absorbed, P IN , are given in Table 1,
along with the proportion of optimum mean absorbed power
these represent. The optimum mean absorbed power is
438.38 mW. Not unexpectedly, the mean power absorbed by the
The energy per unit area of the irregular wave, Eq. (6), is given
by
E g
N
X
Sf k f
k1
g t2
N
X
f k 2
g
2
k1
f k 2 2Sf k f
10
As N-1, and f -0, Eq. (8) for the optimum mean power in
irregular becomes:
)
2
Z 1 (
q pk jF 1 j2 Sf
P IN;opt
df
11
4 b55
0
Zero-crossing period, Tz
Energy period, Te
Spectrum peak period, Tp
Cw (%)
(P IN , mW)
mum P IN (%)
292.25
46
140
355.72
438.38
56
69
170
210
489
490
Table 2
Capture width and wave power of the model at the peak frequency of 1 Hz.
Hm0 (mm) cw (%) Wave power (mW/
m)
19.7
29.8
33.2
38
42.5
0.161
0.573
0.619
0.92
0.935
33
53
46
60
48
186
368
528
598
748
Overtopping
devices
Mean cw 17
Heaving
devices
Floating
OWSCs
Fixed
OWSCs
WRASPA
16
12
37
39
Table 4
Comparison of energy performance (cw) of WRASPA with other xed OWECs
(Babarit, 2015).
OWEC
WRASPA
Biopower
Edinburgh duck
Bristol cylinder
Lancaster exible
bag
Lanchester clam
Wave plunger
Top-hinged aps
WEPTOS
46
45
47
46
9
53
38.5
54
48
51
25.6
6.6
37
75
20
23
16
25
10
51
16
25
16
27
15
25
2.9
491
References
7. Conclusion
The optimum power of a point absorber wave energy converter
in irregular wave was estimated using a linear potential theory, a
method commonly used for evaluating the performance of WECs.
Numerical results show that the choice of tuning period has a
major effect on the power output of the device. The frequency
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Acknowledgments
The authors are indebted to late Dr. Andy McCabe for his help in
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nancial support for this work. We thank two anonymous
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