Abstract
The growth of the offshore wind industry in the last couple of decades has made this technology a key player in the maritime sector. The sustainable development of the offshore wind sector is crucial for this to consolidate within a global scenario of climate change and increasing threats to the marine environment. In this context, multipurpose platforms have been proposed as a sustainable approach to harnessing different marine resources and combining their use under the same platform. Hybrid wind-wave systems are a type of multipurpose platform where a single platform combines the exploitation of offshore wind and wave energy. In particular, this paper deals with a novel hybrid wind-wave system that integrates an oscillating water column wave energy converter with an offshore wind turbine on a jacket-frame substructure. The main objective of this paper is to characterise the hydrodynamic response of the WEC sub-system of this hybrid energy converter. A 1:50 scale model was tested under regular and irregular waves to characterise the hydrodynamic response of the WEC sub-system. The results from this analysis lead to the proof of concept of this novel hybrid system; but additionally, to characterising its behaviour and interaction with the wave field, which is a requirement for fully understanding the benefits of hybrid systems.
Highlights
In the last couple of decades, offshore wind energy has become a major player in the world’s renewable energy sector, with 15.8 GW of installed capacity in Europe at the end of 2017 [1].This exceptional development has been, to a large extent, driven by the relatively shallow waters and good wind resources of the North Sea, which washes the shores of one of the most industrialised regions of the planet [2]
A novel hybrid wind-wave energy converter for jacket-frame substructures was successfully studied by means of an intensive physical modelling test campaign
Previous research on either hybrid or wave energy converter (WEC) devices was mostly focused on individual parameters, such as the efficiency or the response amplitude operator (RAO)
Summary
In the last couple of decades, offshore wind energy has become a major player in the world’s renewable energy sector, with 15.8 GW of installed capacity in Europe at the end of 2017 [1].This exceptional development has been, to a large extent, driven by the relatively shallow waters and good wind resources of the North Sea, which washes the shores of one of the most industrialised regions of the planet [2]. In a global scenario of climate change and amid mounting threats to the marine environment [4,5,6,7], the sustainable development of offshore wind is crucial for the consolidation of the industry, and to providing a reliable and accessible source of renewable energy In this context, multipurpose platforms have been suggested as a sustainable means of exploitation of certain maritime resources, which are usually in the same area [8,9,10,11]—e.g., marine renewable energies (MREs), food resources (fisheries and aquaculture), maritime transport and leisure, among others. On the basis of the strong synergies between offshore wind and wave energy [12,13,14], hybrid wind-wave systems have been proposed as one of the most promising types of multipurpose platforms [15]
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