PRIMRE/Signature Projects/Reference Model 6: Oscillating Water Column
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< PRIMRE | Signature Projects
Signature Projects are intended to bring focus to a selection of the U.S. Departments of Energy's Water Power Technology Office (WPTO) projects. By designating a Signature Project, the project reports, data sets, 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.
Reference Model 6: Oscillating Water Column
- Project Summary
- The Reference Model Project was a partnered effort to develop open-source marine hydrokinetic (MHK) point designs as reference models to benchmark MHK technology performance and costs, and an open-source methodology for design and analysis of MHK technologies, including models for estimating their capital costs, operational costs, and levelized costs of energy.
- Reference Model 6
- Oscillating Water Column
- Reference Model 6 (RM6) is a Backward Bent Duct Buoy (BBDB), which is a type of oscillating water column wave energy converter. First proposed by Masuda, the BBDB design is a floating Oscillating Water Column (OWC) device that consists of an air chamber, an L-shaped duct, bow and stern buoyancy modules, and a power take-off (PTO) composed of a Wells air turbine and a generator. This L- shaped device opens to the ocean downstream from the wave propagation direction. Power is produced by the motion of the wave, which causes the ambient pressure in the air chamber to vary thereby forcing air to flow through the Wells turbine. The reference wave energy resource for RM6 was developed from site information collected near Eureka, in Humboldt County, California.
- The floating BBDB design capitalizes on the coupling between the motion of the structure and motion of the free surface contained within the structure. This coupling can expand the frequency range over which good power conversion occurs thus yielding a higher primary conversion efficiency when compared to other OWC’s.
- The mooring layout was designed to maximize energy production in the operational climate but still have high reliability in severe weather conditions at the chosen test site near Eureka, CA. Therefore, the mooring was laid out to have two front lines separated by 60º with the bisector of that angle being the operational incident wave direction and the aft line along the operational incident wave direction.
- The wave-to-pneumatic converter is designed to capture the most available power from the incident waves. This is dictated mainly by the physical structure and the controls (implemented through the power conversion chain) used to influence the dynamics of the physical structure. The pneumatic power is then converted to electrical power by use of an air turbine connected to an electric generator. The electricity produced is conditioned prior to insertion to the local power grid.
- The Wells air turbine is a power extraction device capable of collecting power in a bi-directional flow. It is attractive for use in OWC devices owing to the bi-directional nature of the flow in such devices. The Wells turbine consists of a fixed number of blades, which typically have a symmetric airfoil profile, and which have the blade chord oriented perpendicular to the rotational axis of the rotor.
Project Information
| Primary Project: | Reference Model |
|---|---|
| Status: | Completed |
| Start Date: | 2010/09/01 |
| End Date: | 2014/09/01 |
| Organization: | National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Pennsylvania State University, Re Vision Consulting LLC, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), US Department of Energy (DOE) |
| Contact: | Vincent Neary |
This table lists documents associated with the RM6: Oscillating Water Column project, including reports written by the project team and/or papers that have used the project outputs or are closely associated with them.
