The paper describes a new, fully coupled, wave energy converter (WEC) design tool, WaveDyn and its application to the design of the WaveRoller WEC. GL Garrad Hassan (GH) has been supporting AWEnergy (AWE) on the development of their commercial scale ‘WaveRoller’ machine, deriving independent numerical and experimental performance related predictions, namely load and absorbed power estimates.
WaveDyn allows users to load hydrodynamic data for a specific geometry, define a multi-body structural model with all associated physical links and characterize the power take-off (PTO) in detail, potentially incorporating internal PTO dynamics. The software also incorporates a moorings module whereby as user may apply nonlinear force profiles to specific points in the structure.
Under this work, all core WaveDyn modules have been used to iterate on a range of geometries, hydrodynamic theories, PTO target profiles (including nonlinearities) and technical constraints (e.g. maximum allowable PTO torque). The fullycoupled modelling approach allows the influence of major design variables on the complete system to be assessed. Some key results are presented here and compared with experiments conducted at 1:24 scale.
