Abstract
In this paper, the two campaigns of experiments made on the SEAREV wave energy converter are presented. These campaigns happened in year 2006 in the “Ecole Centrale de Nantes” (ECN) wave tank. Purposes of these campaigns were to verify the numerical models and the efficiency of latching control applied to the SEAREV WEC.
The system was tested both in regular waves and in random waves. Comparisons were made between the numerical models and the experiments. A good agreement is found while the wave remains small. When amplitude of the wave becomes larger, non linear effects such as slamming and parametric roll appears. These phenomena limit the motion of the buoy and consequently the energy absorption.
It has been shown numerically in previous papers [4] that latching control is an efficient way of improving the global efficiency of the SEAREV. So, latching control was implemented in the model and was tested in the wave tank. In regular waves, we observed that the amplification of the energy production by the control can be up to 10 times the energy production without control. In random waves, we achieved an improvement of the energy production by 50 to 86 %.