Presenting winners of latest WES funding award

Wave Energy Scotland (WES) has recently awarded £2.25 million to 8 wave energy technology developers to support the development of their technologies.

The successful projects will receive funding to take their technologies through WES’ stage one technology development process.

Take a look at the brief description of the wave energy technologies that received the funding.

Project: Attenuator Cost of Energy Reduction (ACER); Developer: 4C Engineering with Sea Power

The Sea Power Platform is a two-body Wave Energy Converter (WEC) that has been under development since 2008. The WEC is classed as a floating attenuator device with energy extracted via the relative motion of two bodies connected by a hinged joint. A PTO system interfaces the two bodies at the hinge and extracts power by damping the motions of the device in wave climates. This project will bring together design engineers and experts from various fields to carry out realistic small scale testing and conceptual full scale studies in order to quantify the cost of energy.

The project was awarded £300,000.

Project: WaveTrain Sloped Pneumatic WEC; Developer: Joules Energy Efficiency Services

The WaveTrain device is essentially an array of several power modules, each utilising a collection of parallel inclined tubes, open at the bottom but closed with a canopy at the free surface and utilising a pneumatic turbine power take-off system.

The project was awarded £291,039.

Project: WaveNET Series 12; Developer: Albatern

Albatern is a developer of the WaveNET array system for wave energy conversion. The array is constructed of hexagonally interconnected Squid modules, each consisting of three articulated link arms connected together in a star formation at a central node with a surface piercing central riser. Passing waves induce motion at the articulated joints, and this relative motion is converted to electrical power via a hydraulic take-off system.

The project was awarded £259,867.

Project: CCell Mark 3 – Novel Curved WEC Optimisation; Developer: Zyba Limited with The University of Bath

CCell is an Oscillating Wave Surge Converter (OWSC) designed to maximise the energy extracted from ocean waves through curvature of the paddle. Laboratory tests of the curved Mark 1 CCell paddle and its control system have demonstrated a four-fold increase in performance-to-cost ratio compared to other flap-based WECs.

The curved structure not only improves the hydrodynamic performance, extracting more energy from each wave, but it also provides additional strength that reduces the amount of material needed to construction the paddle.

The project was awarded £252,024.

Project: Anaconda Novel Wave Energy Converter; Developer: Checkmate Seaenergy

In essence, Anaconda is a long water-filled flexible rubber tube floating just beneath the sea surface and aligned in the direction of wave travel, with a power generating turbine at the stern. As a wave passes, the tube flexes due to varying pressures in the sea causing a “bulge” wave to propagate down the tube’s length, gathering energy from the sea wave as it goes.

Continuous energy gathering results from careful design of the system, matching a resonance between the bulge wave and the incident sea wave. Energy from the sea wave is stored in the tube as the bulge wave grows and stretches the rubber. The bulge wave travels just in front of the wave rather like a surfer, picking up energy as it progressively increases in size. At the end of the tube, the bulge wave energy surge drives a turbine in the power take off after the flow has been smoothed.

The project was awarded £271,012.

Project: Advanced Archimedes Waveswing; Developer: AWS Ocean Energy

This project is aimed at investigating potential for significant improvements to the economic performance of the Archimedes Waveswing WEC following recent innovations and developments. The original Waveswing concept was tested and demonstrated at large scale offshore Portugal in 2004 however despite significant research and development effort the configuration was found not to provide an economic solution to offshore wave power generation at that time. Recent work by AWS Ocean Energy has improved the fundamental understanding of the device and as a result has identified new configurations for the concept which will provide a very significant improvement to the cost of energy whilst reducing technical risk.

The project was awarded £284,853.

Project: Mocean Wave Energy Converter; Developer: Mocean Energy with University of Edinburgh

The Mocean WEC is a hinged raft. Wave forcing and the bodies’ dynamic responses leads to a motion about the hinge (called flex), which drives a power take-off mechanism that converts the kinetic energy into electricity. It has 7 degrees of freedom (DOF). The innovation of the Mocean WEC is in the design of the shapes of the bodies, which dramatically improves its dynamics and thus power absorption.

The project was awarded £299,491.

Project: AISV for step reduction in WEC cost of energy; Developer: Quoceant with Orion Energy Centre

The Novel Device Concept proposed here is a large Automatically Inflatable and Stowable Volume (‘AISV’) to significantly change the hull volume of a given machine configuration to deliver a much better engineering and economic compromise, rather than a completely new machine concept or class.

The project was awarded £300,000.

Source: HIE; Images: The Developers