Abstract
For cost savings and ease of operation, nearshore regions have been considered as ideal regions for deploying wave energy converters (WECs) and wave farms. As the water depths of these regions may be frequently limited to 50 m or less, they can be considered as being transitional/intermediate to shallow when compared to the wave lengths of interest for wave energy conversion. Since the impact of water depths on propagation of waves is significant, it cannot be ignored in wave energy assessment. According to the basic wave theory, in order to work out accurate wave energy amounts in finite water depth, detailed wave spectral distributions should be given. However, for some practical reasons, there are still some cases where only scatter diagrams and/or the statistical wave parameters are available, whilst the detailed wave spectra are discarded. As a result, the assessments of wave energy and resources are frequently determined by ignoring the effect of water depths or using very simplified approximations. This research paper aims to develop more accurate approximation methods by utilising a number of available parameters such that a better estimate on the wave resource assessment can be achieved even if the detailed wave spectra are not available. As one important goal, the research can provide some important indications on how the measured wave data are effectively presented so that they can be very useful for assessing the wave energy resource, especially in the cases including the effects of finite water depths.
Highlights
Accurate assessment of the wave energy climate is very important for the reliable determination of wave energy converters (WECs) power performance and survivability
Scatter diagrams are used for assessing the wave energy resources
From the analyses and comparisons, the proposed method is capable of significantly improving the accuracy of the assessment of wave energy resource
Summary
Accurate assessment of the wave energy climate is very important for the reliable determination of WEC power performance and survivability. Large scale studies can either be on a global level providing information on the global wave energy resource and the distribution of wave energy [1,2,3,4], or on a regional level where national wave energy resources are assessed [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] From such types of studies, the global offshore wave power is estimated at 32,000 TWh/year [2], and the availability of wave energy resources can vary significantly. For commercial wave energy development, accurate and reliable measurements and assessments of the sea waves at the planned sites is critical for both the performance and survivability of the installed devices. Nearshore and shallow water regions have been primarily examined for Energies 2017, 10, 1188; doi:10.3390/en10081188 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies
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