AIP Scitation, one of the world’s largest non-profit publishers of scientific information, published a study called “Methods of reducing power fluctuations in wave energy parks”, which discusses different methods for improving output power quality.
In this paper, different methods of reducing the fluctuations and improving the output power quality are studied. The parameters studied include the number of devices, the separating distance between units, the global and local geometries of the array, sea state and incoming wave direction, and the impact of including buoys of different radii in an array.
The results show that, the fluctuations as well as power per device decrease strictly with the number of interacting units, when the separating distance is kept constant. However, including more devices in a park with fixed area will not necessarily result in lowered power fluctuations.
The study also shows that varying the distance between units affects the power fluctuations to a much larger extent than it affects the magnitude of the absorbed power.
The fluctuations are slightly lower in more realistic, randomized geometries where the buoys tend to drift slightly off their mean positions, and significantly lower in semi-circular geometries as opposed to rectangular geometries.
You can read the study here .
Image: flickr/Isaac Bowen