Tank Test of an Active Power Rectification in Wave-to-Wire Energy Conversion

Conference · Mon Sep 30 04:00:00 EDT 2019

OSTI ID:1659389

Chen, ChienAn ^[1]; Li, Xiaofan; Martin, Dillon; Zuo, Lei

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1. Virginia Tech

Maximum power control algorithms in wave energy converter (WEC) are mainly based on the fluid-structure dynamics with impedance matching from power take-off (PTO) damping or model predictive control through the buoy dynamics. However, the conventional buoy characteristics study cannot satisfy estimation of maximum output power in a practical wave-to-wire (W2W) system due to significant losses on mechanical and electrical components from PTO to power converter in comparison with the losses on the buoy. To analysis the non-ideal effects from mechanical transmission and energy conversion characteristics of WEC with a power converter output, a W2W simulation and tank testing is performed. The 1:20 scale WEC system with 1.17m buoy diameter includes a single body heaving buoy, mechanical-motion-rectifier based power-take-off, and power converter that store its output energy to a battery load. From the tank testing results, a circuit model is built and is used to estimate the system performance. The non-ideal effects such as viscous damping between buoy and power take-off, gearbox loss, generator loss, and power converter loss in the system are included in the circuit model with efficiencies from 60 - 80%. The maximum extracted power results under various wave conditions are dominated by these non-ideal effect.

• Research Organization: Virginia Tech
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Water Power Technologies Office
• DOE Contract Number: EE0007174
• OSTI ID: 1659389
• Report Number(s): DOE-Virginia Tech-07174
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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