Experimental and Numerical Comparisons of a Dual-Flap Floating Oscillating Surge Wave Energy Converter in Regular Waves

Yi-Hsiang Yu, Nathan Tom, Kelley Ruehl, Dominic Forbush

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

34 Scopus Citations

Abstract

The floating oscillating surge wave energy converter (FOSWEC) is a wave energy converter that was designed, built, and tested to develop an open-access data set for the purpose of numerical model validation. This paper details the experimental testing of the 1:33-scale FOSWEC in a directional wave basin, and compares experimental data to numerical simulations using the wave energy converter simulator (WEC-Sim) open-source code. The FOSWEC consists of a floating platform moving in heave, pitch, and surge, and two pitching flaps. Power is extracted through relative motion between each of the flaps and the platform. The device was designed to constrain different degrees of freedom so that it could be configured into a variety of operating conditions with varying dynamics. The FOSWEC was tested in a range of different conditions including: static offset, free decay, forced oscillation, wave excitation, and dynamic response to regular waves. In this paper, results from the range of experimental tests are presented and compared to numerical simulations using the WEC-Sim code.

Original languageAmerican English
Article number106575
Number of pages17
JournalOcean Engineering
Volume196
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Jan 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-5000-73456

Keywords

  • Experimental testing
  • Numerical simulation
  • Validation
  • Wave energy
  • WEC-Sim

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