Annual Report 2016
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PORTUGAL

Ana Brito e Melo & Antonio Falcão WavEC & Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT


WavEC
WavEC is a private non-profit association, currently with 11 associates (industrial and public), and devoted to the development and promotion of offshore energy utilization thorough technical and strategic support to companies and public bodies. WavEC team is composed by 20 specialists with a broad range of experience on ocean energy, including both the technical (numerical modelling, wave resource, monitoring, technology) and non-technical (economic models, environmental and licensing, public policies, dissemination) issues.

WavEC is a founding member of the European Ocean Energy Association (OEE) and associate member of the European Energy Research Alliance.

In 2016, WavEC coordinated two European funded projects (WETFEET and OCEANET) and was further strongly involved in a number of R&D projects mainly funded by the European Commission and by the national Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), through the Oceanera-net funding programme.


The following table lists the R&D projects addressing ocean energy conducted by WavEC:
 

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In September 2016, a public session was organised in Portugal by the Swedish developer Corpower Ocean AB in collaboration with WavEC and the Portuguese start-up Composite Solutions, to present Corpower’s wave energy prototype. The device was built in Portugal by Composite Solutions with 11 m long and 4 m in diameter, and transported to Sweden to be then tested in Scotland. This development was undertaken within the European funded project HiWave - “High Efficiency Wave Power” – concluded in 2016, led by Corpower, with Iberdrola and WavEC as partners. Wave-Boost is the new three-year Horizon 2020 funded project approved in 2016 aiming to develop and validate an innovative Power Take-Off (PTO) technology. This project will be conducted by an European consortium including Corpower, EDP, WavEC, EMEC, the SP Technical Research Institute, PMC Cylinders, the University of Edinburgh and GS-Hydro.
 

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 Corpower wave energy prototype build in Portugal (http://composite-solutions.pt/en/category/press/)
 

Under the scope of the OCEANIC project, WavEC has deployed in August 2016 an experimental structure to test different coating techniques. The structure was designed and assembled in WavEC premises and was installed in the WaveRoller test site location.

The 18 months H2020 project RICORE ended in 2016 with a public event during EUSEW 2016 (European Union Sustainable Energy Week). More information about RICORE is available on the project website (http://ricore-project.eu/).

In the scope of the four-year Marie Curie funded OCEANET project two workshops took place in 2016, one in Sweden (Environmental impact & monitoring of offshore renewable energy farms) and a second one in Ireland (Social and economic impacts of offshore renewable energy). WavEC lectured the environment and economic modules in both courses, respectively.

The Atlantic Power Cluster project was one of the five winners of the Atlantic Project Award in September 2016. The Atlantic Project Awards ceremony was held during the 3rd Atlantic Stakeholder Platform Conference in Dublin on September 27, 2016. These awards were designed to honour outstanding success stories, achieved by projects in the geographical area covered by the Atlantic Strategy and related to the implementation of the Atlantic Action Plan. WavEC took a relevant participation in this EU funded project that aimed to apply a marine renewable transnational strategy in the Atlantic area.


Another three R&D projects were approved in late 2016 to start in 2017:

  • MARINET2: a network of testing infrastructures for wave and tidal energy, giving easy access conditions to developers.
     
  • MARINERG-I: aiming to become the leading internationally distributed infrastructure in the Marine Renewable Energy sector.
     
  • ERAKRAKEN: aiming to tackle the existing gap of the ROV tools specially designed for the Ocean Energy sector needs with the objective to reduce the high OPEX costs associated to the underwater inspection repair and maintenance.


Instituto Superior Técnico
Two groups were active on ocean energy at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon:

  • Institute of Mechanical Engineering (IDMEC) with decades-long history in wave energy conversion studies;
     
  • Centre for Marine Technology and Engineering (CENTEC), whose involvement in ocean energy is more recent.

Following previous years, the activity at IDMEC concentrated on wave energy conversion, especially the development of new types of oscillating water column converters (OWCs) and self-rectifying air turbines. An important area of research at IDMEC is latching control of floating and fixed-structure OWC converters, taking advantage of the new types of air turbines fitted with fast valves.

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Model testing of the biradial turbine at IST (left); twin-rotor radial-inflow turbine (right).

 

IDMEC/IST is a partner in the WETFEET project (European H2020 programme); their involvement concerns mainly the experimental development of a high-efficiency twin-rotor radial-inflow self-rectifying air turbine. IDMEC/IST is also a partner in the OPERA project (H2020), in which they are developing the biradial self-rectifying air turbine with a new type of fixed guide vanes. Model testing took place at IST in 2016. Also within the framework of the OPERA project, a prototype of the biradial turbine was designed jointly by IDMEC/IST and the Portuguese company Kymaner, and is being constructed to be field-tested in 2017, firstly at one of the OWCs of the Mutriku breakwater (Basque Country, Spain) and subsequently, also in the Bay of Biscay, on the spar-buoy OWC of the Spanish company Oceantec.

Ocean energy is a major area in the diversified activity of CENTEC/IST. The activities at CENTEC in ocean energy involved a wide range of topics covering waves, tidal currents and offshore wind. The characterization of the wave energy resource (and to a much lesser extent tidal and offshore wind energies) at various oceanic locations in the world has been one of the dominant topics. The study of ocean energy conversion focused mainly on wave energy converters, with numerical theoretical/modelling of several types of devices and arrays, and also PTOs (namely hydraulic-circuit PTOs).