Abstract
This paper details the development of a survival strategy for the Oscilla Power Triton Wave Energy Converter. This work was completed as part of a DoE project to reduce the costs of wave energy. We investigated a number of different approaches to managing the extreme loads in the Triton system which are described herein. A primarily numerical approach was taken to evaluate the relative performance of these strategies against the baseline system, while CFD and small scale physical model testing are currently being pursued to validate the performance of the leading approach.
Characteristics of the baseline system are discussed that were leveraged to identify suitable strategies. Midfidelity numerical modeling was used to evaluate performance and a key interest of this work is the suitability of this numerical approach in the highly non-linear nature of extreme waves. In addition to a highly instrumented physical model, a number of different, high fidelity CFD approaches are used to determine extreme loads within the system.