| 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.
The testing programme devised for producing validation data for the assessment of numerical models of large arrays has been successfully completed. In the process of completing this test programme new methodologies for the testing of WEC arrays have been developed that support the isolation of array interactions from other physical testing artefacts as well as enabling the uncertainty in WEC performance to be estimated. This is considered to be a significant addition to the outcome of this testing programme that will have a major impact on the design of wave tank testing of WEC arrays.
Although in general the data quality is high, in the characterisation testing it is lower than desired due to unresolved resonant oscillations in the supporting structure, which was evident to some extentin all the characterisation tests. However, the characterisation testing is not considered to be a critical element of the test programme and has a minimal impact on the extent of validation data produced. |
