Investigating the effect of varying the distribution of damping Investigating the effect of varying the distribution of damping coefficients inside a floater blanket on the power extraction for a novel wave energy converter.

Hoogerbrugge, C. V. A. (2018) Investigating the effect of varying the distribution of damping Investigating the effect of varying the distribution of damping coefficients inside a floater blanket on the power extraction for a novel wave energy converter. Bachelor's Thesis, Industrial Engineering and Management.

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Abstract

This report is part of a research into the development of a novel Wave Energy Converter (WEC) called the Ocean Grazer. The WEC uses an array of interconnected floaters in a so called floater blanket to harvest wave energy at open sea. The amount of energy that is extracted from the wave is highly dependent on the damping force. The damping force that each damper exerts on the incoming waves can be separately adapted for each floater, in order to improve the performance of the floater blanket. Considering that each floater has 8 possible damping settings, and that a floater blanket of 100 floaters is considered for this report, this results in 2*1090 possible configurations. For analysis of the performance of the floater blanket at different configurations a frequency-domain MATLAB model is created by the Ocean Grazer team. This model uses a configuration of damping coefficients as its input, and returns information about e.g. the capture factor (the relation between the amount of power in the incoming wave and the extracted power). With the current available computational power it is however still impossible to run each configuration through the MATLAB-model in order to find the most appropriate setting. This report focusses on discovering general relations between different damping coefficients and their corresponding performances, measured in capture factors for each frequency. Three methods of data acquisition are applied: an analytical method, a brute force method and a Particle Swarm Optimization-method. The most striking results are: - That a configuration, which has increasing damping coefficients from the side where the incident wave meets the floater blanket, seems to always provide a higher capture factor than a uniform configuration, which in turn provides a higher capture factor than a configuration which has decreasing damping coefficients from the side where the incident wave meets the floater blanket. - That there is a cross-over wave frequency at which the optimal configuration for the floater blanket changes from a configuration in which the highest damping coefficients are found in the columns at the edges of the floater blanket, to a configuration where the highest damping coefficients are found in the centre columns of the floater blanket.

Item Type:	Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis)
Degree programme:	Industrial Engineering and Management
Thesis type:	Bachelor's Thesis
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	15 Feb 2018 08:35
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2018 08:35
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/16421

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