PhD Talks: Improving the Feasibility of Wave Energy Converters

Jian Tan

Ocean waves contain a huge amount of clean energy, which is attractive to renewable energy communities. Wave energy has been researched over decades, and a number of wave energy converters (WECs) have been proposed and even tested. However, its levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is much higher than other competitive renewable technologies, such as wind energy and solar energy. This is a big hurdle to the large-scale commercialization of WECs.

Sizing is influential to the techno-economic performance of WECs, and it is expected to contribute to the improvement. However, in order to comprehensively size WECs, multiple components and energy transmission stages need to be considered, including captors and power take-off (PTO) systems. Hence, a systematic sizing method is required. The challenges include: 1) how to accelerate the calculation since sizing normally requires a large number of numerical iterations; 2) how PTO sizing interacts with the overall sizing of WECs; 3) how to further improve the power production with constrained PTO sizes.

This presentation would cover the main motivation and recent progress of this research.

If you are attending for the colloquium points, please come by the Froude office beforehand to pick up a colloquium form.