Signature Projects are intended to bring focus to a selection of U.S. Department of Energy's Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) projects. By designating a Signature Project, the project reports, datasets, and associated papers can be easily discoverable. By bringing together all aspects of a project, whether a completed legacy project or an ongoing investigation, the MRE community can be informed of what investigations have been undertaken, which have succeeded, what tools are available, and where gaps in information persist.
wecsim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator) is an open-source code for simulating wave energy converters. The code is developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK using the multi-body dynamics solver Simscape Multibody. WEC-Sim has the ability to model devices that are comprised of rigid bodies, joints, power take-off systems, and mooring systems. Simulations are performed in the time-domain by solving the governing wave energy converter equations of motion in 6 degrees-of-freedom.
Project Description
WEC-Sim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator) is an open-source code for simulating wave energy converters. The code is developed in MATLAB/Simulink using the multi-body dynamics solver Simscape Multibody. WEC-Sim has the ability to model devices that are comprised of rigid bodies, joints, power take-off systems, and mooring systems. Simulations are performed in the time-domain by solving the governing wave energy converter equations of motion in 6 degrees-of-freedom. The WEC-Sim project is a collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office.
Modeling wave energy converters (WECs) involves the interaction between the incident waves, device motion, power-take-off (PTO mechanism), and mooring. WEC-Sim uses a radiation and diffraction method (Babarit et al. 2012, Li et al. 2012) to predict power performance and design optimization. The radiation and diffraction method generally obtains the hydrodynamic forces from a frequency-domain boundary element method (BEM) solver using linear coefficients to solve the system dynamics in the time domain. The WEC-Sim code is developed in MATLAB/Simulink using the multi-body dynamics solver Simscape Multibody.
This table lists documents associated with the WEC-Sim project, including reports written by the project team, links to relevant data or modeling codes, and papers that have used the project outputs or are closely associated with them. To find additional datasets and documents that look at the environmental perspective of this work, explore the WEC-Sim page on PRIMRE.
