Marine Renewable Energy - Storage
Abstract
The project aims to investigate the importance of fully nonlinear simulations of marine renewable energy with special focus on floating wave energy converters (fWECs). The power production from fWECs is today computed with linear models. Although fast, the accuracy of these methods close to resonance and in large waves is uncertain. Access to advanced models that includes non-linear effects of e.g. viscosity, over-topping and breaking waves is therefore vital for improving device performance without costly field trials. To simulate real sea states in CFD is a computationally very demanding task due to long-time (1000 wave periods) unsteady simulations and access to HPC resources is vital for the success of the project. The CFD runs are to be used to design better methods for predicting the survivability and reliability of fWECs, especially for slamming event. It will also be used to provide training data for machine learning approaches to improve the drag estimation in linear methods.
The wind-wave interaction influences the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) which directly influence the power production of offshore wind turbines. This is well-known and supported by simulations. However, these studies have been performed in constant water depth. Most offshore wind farms are located on relatively shallow depth where bathymetric variation influences the transformation of the waves. This project will look into the effect of variable water depth on the development of the MABL, through coupled wind-wave simulation.
