Both the UK and China face great demands for offshore renewable energy (ORE) yet high risks have impeded faster development. While the cost of generated energy has just been reduced to £100/MWhr for offshore wind in the UK (4 years ahead of government schedule) deployment further offshore will increase both the capital and operational & maintenance (O&M) costs.
Recognising the high risks involved and the development work that is urgently needed in the industry, this project aims to carry out fundamental modelling and validating work that will lead to the capability of virtual prototyping. Such a capability will significantly accelerate and de-risk the development work in industry. Complementary expertise in the two countries are combined to address the requirements of overall system performance from ORE devices (wind and wave) to grid, and focuses on the critical technical aspects that will dictate the design decisions.
The primary objective of the project is to enable the virtual prototyping of the powertrains and power takeoff (PTO) mechanisms of future offshore wind and wave energy devices which can then be optimised in terms cost, efficiency and reliability (availability) from the view point of the overall system from the device to the grid. It will also allow the marine environmental constraints to be taken into account at the early stage of design. The virtual prototyping capability aims to promote and de-risk the development of offshore renewable energy technologies. The project has the following specific objectives:
- To model the hardware and control of PTO systems in order to:
- achieve high overall system resource-to-wire efficiency in a computationally efficient manner, allowing effective optimisation and design.
- achieve high overall system availability in an efficient manner, allowing effective optimisation and design.
- achieve low manufacturing cost and scaling, allowing effective optimisation and design.
- To integrate models of devices and their power conversion systems enabling PTO design and control to be optimised for various objective functions, especially cost of energy.
- To provide documentation of the developed tools, research data and model management and produce outputs suitable for journal and conference publications and develop pathways for impact.
