Abstract
In 2013 the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) initiated the WEC-Sim project with the objective of developing a verified and validated open-source wave energy converter (WEC) simulation tool to promote and support the wave energy industry and research community. To achieve this objective, NREL and SNL identified three main tasks. (1) Develop WEC-Sim, an open source MATLAB based wave simulation tool, (2) Verify the accuracy of WEC-Sim through code-tocode comparison, and (3) Validate the WEC-Sim code with existing data and/or generate experimental data for WEC-Sim code validation.
The first version of WEC-Sim (v1.0) was released in Summer 2014 and the most recent version of the code (v1.1) was released in Spring 2015, and available via GitHub [1]. Since the initial release, the WEC-Sim development team has focused on improving the WEC-Sim code, adding features, and on code verification and validation. In this extended abstract updates are provided on the status of the WEC-Sim project, focusing on:
- Version 1.1 release of WEC-Sim with stability improvements and feature additions.
- The WEC-Sim experimental testing campaign whose objective is to create an open source experimental data set that can be used to verify and validate WEC-Sim and other wave energy converter simulation tools.
- WEC-Sim’s participation in Maynooth University Center for Ocean Renewable Energy (COER) Hydrodynamic Modeling Competition [2].
- The Wave Energy Converter Code Comparison (WEC3) project Starting with a brief review of the WEC-Sim code, this extended abstract provides detail on each of these ongoing WEC-Sim research activities