As we reflect on our recent 3rd ranking in the wave energy competition, we are deeply grateful for all the amazing support from all of...
Water Power Technologies Office
November 23, 2016
minute read time
As we reflect on our recent third ranking in the wave energy competition, we are deeply grateful for all the amazing support from all of our partners and colleagues. A key benefit of working with such an outstanding team was that we were able to improve our ACE metric by more than ten-fold over the course of the 1-year competition. This included: (1) Changing the mooring design, (2) optimizing the device structure changing the design from steel to fiber reinforced plastics, and (3) Implementation of three different control strategies in the computational domain that showed a performance upside potential of 2x over the current status. Without our teams relentless efforts, none of these improvements would have been possible:
- Mirko Previsic – who led the team to success bringing his deep insights in techno-economic optimization of WEC devices to the table, including the structural design and controls optimization.
- Simon & Jude from AWS energy – our primary Scottish partners. They brought in the technology and a deep background and design-intuition on this device having been involved with it’s development for a long time.
- Johannes Spinneken who played a critical role during the tank testing campaign.
- Anantha Karthikeyan – a member of the team at Re Vision Consulting, who worked on the controls optimization and numerical simulation work leading to a potential performance improvement of 2–3X.
- Ajay Mathew – a summer intern who helped us during the tank testing campaign with post-processing of data.
- Jeff Scruggs at University of Michigan who developed an optimal feed-back controller for the machine based on the theory he developed.
- The COWI group in the San Francisco Bay area. They were instrumental in the structural re-design effort, going from steel to FRP.
- 4c Engineering for designing and building the two scale models that were required for the competition.
- Oregon Ironworks a steel mfg based in Oregon for the help in assessing steel structural costs.
- Orenco Composites a FRP manufacturing outfit based in Oregon who helped us refine our design and manufacturing process.
- University of Iowa for letting us test our 1:50-scale and 1:20-scale device there.
- We also would like to acknowledge the tremendous effort by the WEC-Prize team, which includes the National lab team and the amazing crew at Carderock.
Finally, a really warm thank you to the U.S. Department of Energy – in particular Alison Labonte and Jose Zayas for their vision in creating such a transformative effort.