Projects per year
Abstract
Unsteady wave loading on tidal turbines impacts significantly the design, and expected life-time, of turbine blades and other key components. Model-scale testing of tidal turbines in the wave-current environment can provide vital understanding by emulating real-world load cases; however, to reduce uncertainty, it is important to isolate laboratory-specific artefacts from real-world behaviour. In this paper, a variety of realistic combined current-wave scenarios is re-created at the FloWave basin, where the main objective is to understand the characteristics of testing in a combined wave-current environment and assess whether wave effects on the flow field can be predicted. Here, we show that a combination of linear wave-current theory and frequency-domain reflection analysis can be used to effectively predict wave-induced particle velocities and identify velocity components that are experimental artefacts. Load-specific mechanisms present in real-world conditions can therefore be isolated, and equivalent full-scale load cases can be estimated with greater confidence. At higher flow speeds, a divergence from the theory presented is observed due to turbulence-induced non-stationarity. The methodology and results presented increase learning about the wave-current testing environment and provide analysis tools able to improve test outputs and conclusions from scale model testing.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 1838 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Energies |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 10 Nov 2017 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- Tank testing
- Tidal energy
- Wave orbitals
- Wave reflection analysis
- Wave-current interaction
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Dive into the research topics of 'Re-creating waves in large currents for tidal energy applications'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 4 Finished
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IAA-Bureau Veritas: EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA). Marine met-ocean data and its use in the tidal energy industry: Bureau Veritas and The University of Edinburgh
Sellar, B. (Principal Investigator)
3/10/16 → 31/01/17
Project: University Awarded Project Funding
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FloWTurb: Response of Tidal Energy Converters to Combined Tidal Flow, Waves, and Turbulence
Venugopal, V. (Principal Investigator) & Borthwick, A. (Co-investigator)
13/04/16 → 31/10/19
Project: Research
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IAA-Alstom: EPSRC Impact Accelerator Account (IAA). Leveraging the ReDAPT Project: Exploitation of the Alstom-University of Edinburgh marine energy data set.
Sellar, B. (Principal Investigator)
2/03/15 → 1/03/16
Project: University Awarded Project Funding