Investigating the potential of combined wind/wave structures
Wave Energy Scotland (WES) has begun a series of tank tests at the University of Edinburgh’s FloWave facility.
Following the promising range of potential benefits identified in the scenarios within the Wave and Floating Wind Energy - Opportunities for Sharing Infrastructure, Services and Supply Chain report supplied by Offshore Wind Consultants (OWC) Ltd, Wave Energy Scotland (WES) has begun a series of tank tests at the University of Edinburgh’s FloWave facility. There are some clear synergies between the technical requirements and suitable locations for floating wind and wave energy. To maximise the future cost reduction in both sectors, it may be effective to share some of the sub-systems and infrastructure between these two technology types. Versatile wind and wave platforms (where projects are in the same region and use common platform designs) may therefore provide an attractive solution to both sectors.
The overall improvement in the physical and numerical understanding of the design drivers will enhance the support WES can offer to developers to optimise their design solutions and to enable future MW-scale multi wave absorber platform systems to be developed.
Alongside this, offshore energy in Scotland was recently bolstered by the leasing of 30GW of ScotWind projects, and several of these leased sites have an attractive wave energy resource which may support versatile wind and wave platforms in the future.
The tank tests currently being completed by WES use sea states which are representative of one of these future floating wind lease sites on the west coast of Scotland, leased through the ScotWind programme and which has an appropriate water depth and wave resource for large scale wave energy exploitation.
The physical model used for the testing incorporates multiple identical wave energy absorbers mounted onto a semi-submerged, triangular floating platform. The platform is generic but similar to many concepts under development within the floating wind sector, while each absorber is a simplified version of a submerged pressure differential device. The absorbers have taken inspiration from AWS Ocean Energy’s Archimedes Waveswing; a submerged wave power buoy which has been developed and funded through WES’s Novel Wave Energy Converter Programme.