The exploitation of wave energy resources represents an attractive opportunity to enlarge and diversify the renewable energy offer. Nevertheless, none of the existing technologies have achieved the complete economic viability to be competitive within the energy market. In order to increase the overall power production efficiency and face the sea state variability, the presence of the control is mandatory. A model of the system is required to tune the controller parameters and predict the resulting performances. Even though the relevance of nonlinearities is magnified by the presence of the controller, the device model employed is usually linear. An implementation of control in a fully nonlinear simulation model is desirable, but missing. Hence, this paper proposes to use the fully nonlinear Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) environment, implementing the latching control strategy in the open source software OpenFOAM.
Implementation of Latching Control in a Numerical Wave Tank Approved The exploitation of wave energy resources represents an attractive opportunity to enlarge and di- versify the renewable energy offer. Nevertheless, none of the existing technologies have achieved complete eco- nomic viability to be competitive within the energy market. In order to increase the overall power produc- tion efficiency and face the sea state variability, the presence of the control is mandatory. A model of the system is required to tune the controller parameters and predict the resulting performances. Even though the relevance of nonlinearities is magnified by the pres- ence of the controller, the device model employed is usually linear. An implementation of control in a fully nonlinear simulation model is desirable, but missing. Hence, this paper proposes to use the fully nonlinear Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) environment, implementing the latching control strategy in the open source software OpenFOAM. A case study has been analyzed to highlight the non- linear behavior of a device under latching control and to evaluate the differences between linear and nonlin- ear simulation models. The results show that the linear model overestimates the amplitude of motion, and, as a result, the extracted power. Moreover, the choice of the optimal control parameter is significantly affected by the nonlinear effect on the natural period of the device.
NWT Latching Control User Manual Approved This user manual is thought to be of assistance to whom is wishing to utilize the latching control algorithm proposed in (Giorgi and Ringwood, 2016). The controller is implemented in a Numerical Wave Tank (NWT), using the CFD open source software OpenFOAM. The application is obtained from the default mesh motion solver of OpenFOAM 2.3, called sixDoFRigidBodyMotion.
Motion solver of OpenFOAM 2.3 "sixDoFRigidBodyMotion" Approved ZIP File.
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