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 software for simulating wave energy converters, hosted on the WEC-Sim repository. The software 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 bodies, joints, power take-off systems, and mooring systems. WEC-Sim can model both rigid bodies and flexible bodies with generalized body modes. Simulations are performed in the time-domain by solving the governing wave energy converter equations of motion in the 6 Cartesian degrees-of-freedom, plus any number of user-defined modes. The WEC-Sim Applications repository contains a wide variety of scenarios that WEC-Sim can be used to model, including desalination, mooring dynamics, nonlinear hydrodynamic bodies, passive yawing, batch simulations and many others. The software is very flexible and can be adapted to many scenarios within the wave energy industry. 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 software is developed in MATLAB/Simulink using the multi-body dynamics solver Simscape Multibody. For more information, refer to the WEC-Sim Documentation.
