Experimental and numerical comparisons of self-reacting point absorber wave energy converters in irregular waves

Experimental Studies of Interaction Forces Affect the Position of Vertical Plates on Oscillating Heave Plates with Cylindrical Bodies in Regular Waves

“…Heave plates are generally widely used in offshore structures because they can provide additional damping and mass increase to enhance the hydrodynamic response of the system (Zhu & Lim, 2017). The application of the use of an additional damper plate in the design of a WEC can increase the average annual energy production by 41% in the case of the point absorber WEC that self-reacts to heave movements in irregular waves (Beatty, Bocking, Bubbar, Buckham, & Wild, 2019).…”

“…Beatty et al (Beatty et al, 2019) conducted an experimental and numerical comparison of the performance of two self-reacting point absorber WEC designs undertaken for heave motions in irregular waves. The results indicate that the WEC design with a damper plate produces 41% higher mean annual energy production than the WEC design with a streamlined reacting body at a representative location near the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.…”

Frequency Domain Modeling of a Halbach PM Linear Generator Based Two-Body Point Absorber for Wave Energy Conversion

“…In addition, Beatty et al (2015) and Davis et al (2014) have proven that the two-body design leads to an increase in the captured power because of the additional hydrodynamic added mass of the submerged body. The experimental study conducted by Beatty et al (2019) has proven that the point absorber with a heaving plate will yield a higher power production by 41%. Furthermore, the heaving plate of the submerged body reacts to the wave-brought oscillation so that the stability of the WEC can be increased.…”

“…Cummins (1962) first proposed a time domain approach in 1962 to describe the hydro-dynamics of floating objects that formed the foundation of the subsequent time domain modeling works by Babarit et al (2012), De Andrés et al 2013, and Olaya et al (2013). Besides the time domain model, various works (Bosma et al, 2012;Beatty et al, 2015Beatty et al, , 2019 have been done to model WEC in frequency domain. Compared to the time domain model, the frequency domain model can save the computational effort and significantly improve the optimization efficiency.…”

“…In order to implement the frequency domain model more accurately, the linearization of the nonlinear viscous drag, has to be addressed. To study the dynamics of the SPTA, and Beatty et al (2019) linearized the nonlinear quadratic dragging by matching a linear system to the experiment results (Beatty et al, 2015) that has a relative small displacement. As presented by Beatty et al (2019), the linearized model matches well with the experiments.…”