Abstract
In the RiaSoR I project, a reliability assessment framework for marine energy technologies was developed, based on established practices from the automotive industry. In particular, the reliability assessment framework was built around the Variation Modes and Effects Analysis (VMEA) methodology, which aims to assist in finding critical aspects of a technology that it is subject to the effects of unwanted variation. In the wake of RiaSoR I, RiaSoR 2 aims to use the reliability assessment framework and apply it to wave energy converter (WEC) design.
In WP3 of the RiaSoR 2 project, a toolbox to assess the reliability of the WEC loads output from a numerical model will be devised. Within the scope of RiaSoR 2, CA will develop a baseline generic WEC model in a modified version of WEC-Sim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator), which will be used to estimate WEC loads. The estimated loads for the generic WEC will provide an input to the reliability assessment. The numerical toolbox will build on work completed in RiaSoR I and apply the VMEA methodology to the numerical load estimates, in an attempt to assess the effects of variations in key metrics and quantify the related uncertainty.
This report outlines the specification of the numerical load analysis and the reliability assessment, and is organised in six main sections. Following this introduction (Section 1), an overview of the WEC design process and an introduction to the concept of WEC reliability assessment is given in Section 2. In Section 3, a description of the design basis for the generic WEC is documented, including the metocean conditions, design situations, and ultimately the design load cases (DLCs) proposed by CA for the load analysis exercise. An overview of WEC-Sim and of the proposed generic WEC model is provided in Section 4, while Section 5 presents an outline of the proposed approach for the reliability assessment of the loads. Finally, the proposed next steps in WP3 of the RiaSoR 2 project are outlined in Section 6.