Offshore wind and wave power can be remarkably complimentary. Given an extended, stable floating platform to share, important economies of renewable power production and energy storage are possible. The Pneumatically Stabilized Platform (PSP) embodies such a platform. Developed with US DARPA support and proved in model scale, the PSP will achieve its at-sea motion stability and structural loads mitigation by decoupling the “hull” from ocean wave pressures through the partial use of mobile air buoyancy. In addition to supporting an array of wind turbines (WTs), the PSP deploys along its seaward edge the “Rho-Cee” wave energy converter (WEC), termed the “Impedance-Matched-Terminator”; comprising a nested set of tuned oscillating water column (OWC) absorbers, resonant across a selected frequency band. By means of impedance matching, highly efficient wave energy absorption is demonstrably achieved.
The PSP and Rho-Cee WEC areconstructed, modularly, in pre-stressed reinforced concrete, which is found degradation-free in long term exposure to sea water – and only concrete touches sea water in the platform, WEC or WT systems. All equipment subject to maintenance, replacement or inspection is “in-the-dry”– fully accessible to platform-resident personnel on foot, dry-shod. With integral foundations, WTs deployed upon such a floating platform can be positioned offshore in the greater water depths favorable to the WECs; avoiding bottom losses. Both sources may store compressed-air potential energy in the internal volumes of their common supporting PSP structure, where it may be charged and tapped by equipment that is already part of the PSP system.
