Brief History
Wave energy research at NUI Maynooth began with the arrival of Micheál Ó Catháin, who became the group’s first research student with a self-proposed project on modelling and control of the McCabe Wave Pump (MWP). Micheál was co-author on our first successful funding proposal in the wave energy area and developed important links with other wave energy researchers and groups, including Prof. Johannes Falnes at NTNU, Norway and Prof. Mike McCormick at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Micheál and his contemporary, Gary Nolan, were the first research students to graduate from the group. The arrival of Dr. Jean Christophe Gilloteaux in 2005 brought some much needed fundamental expertise in hydrodynamic modelling and he made an important contribution and spawned some new research directions over the 2005-2010 period, as well as organising the first NUI Maynooth Wave Energy Workshop in 2009, in conjunction with Ecole Centrale de Nantes and the French Embassy. The COER designation was adopted by the group in 2010.
Watch this video to find out more about COER.
Big news!
The WECCCOMP experimental evaluation has now concluded and the results validated. We are delighted to announce that the winner of the experimental stage was the team from IFPEN, France!
Many congratulations! In fact, the IFPEN team also took the honours at the simulation stage, showing consistently good performance over the 2 stages. However, in the end, there was little daylight between the competitors, all teams performing well in both simulation and at the experimental stage. Probably the most unexpected aspect is that the IFPEN EC score in implementation was even better than the simulation score. A remarkable achievement, considering modelling inaccuracies and noisy measurements!
The experimental performance across the sea states is given in the following bar graph:
Comparative EC scores for simulation and experimental evaluation are in the following table:
Next steps:
- The experimental results will be published/presented in a paper at IFAC World Congress, Berlin, July 2020.
- The simulation results were presented at OMAE 2019, Glasgow and awards presented to the first 3 placed finishers.
- A comprehensive journal paper is currently being prepared by the organisers and competitors and hopefully hit the presses (reviews permitting!) in early 2020.
- Options for extending WECCCOMP are currently being considered, including releasing the problem as an official benchmark problem with validated simulation (and possibly experimental) evaluation. There’s also some discussion related to the possibility of a new benchmark WEC control problem.
Stay tuned!
The system to be used in the control competition is a single degree of freedom (DOF) wave-activated body WEC, as in the following figure.
The control system should be developed in the provided numerical model of the WaveStar device developed in WEC-Sim, shown below.
To learn more about the numerical model and the WEC-Sim simulation environment, click on the button below!
