Abstract |
The Performance Assessment of Wave and Tidal Array Systems (PerAWaT) project, launched in October 2009 with £8m of ETI investment. The project delivered validated, commercial software tools capable of significantly reducing the levels of uncertainty associated with predicting the energy yield of major wave and tidal stream energy arrays. It also produced information that will help reduce commercial risk of future large scale wave and tidal array developments.
This document contains the User Report for the SpecWEC modelling tool. The methodology for using the SpecWEC modelling tool is summarised along with instructions for using the final release and recommendations about best practice when using it. The production and interpretation of results from the SpecWEC modelling tool is also addressed, as are the applications and limitations of the SpecWEC modelling tool. Results from the verification and validation of the tool (from WG1 WP2 D4 and D5) are summarized, where it is shown that, when averaged over the array and all sea states, agreement for power capture between a potential flow model and the SpecWEC modelling tool is better than 9%, and the agreement between experimental wave tank data and the SpecWEC modelling tool is better than 12%.SpecWEC is most suitable for estimating the energy production of a WEC array. Because of the computational efficiency of SpecWEC relative to other phase-resolving WEC array models it can be used to investigate multiple layouts and sea-states to produce estimates of their relative annual average power production. The key limitation of SpecWEC is that it does not produce any phase-dependent information, so that it can only be used for estimating the average expected performance of a WEC array, not the temporal variation of parameters or the extreme values. |