PhD Project: Hydraulic Evaluation Of Wave Energy Converters

My research will mainly focus on the evaluation and exploration of new concepts for wave energy utilization and on the further development of existing wave energy devices.

Therefore, a special attention will be given to the hydraulic performance of the devices, the power take-off (PTO) system, the assessment of energy production and the structural design of the devices. In order to evaluate qualitatively all this figures, the appropriate instrumentation and data acquisition will be essential and so also part of the work. In practice, the study should include the data analysis of several small scale tank tests and real sea tests from different devices analysis. Consequently, some field work in real sea conditions must be expected.

My research study is part of the wavetrain2 project, which is a multinational Initial Training Network (ITN) funded under the European FP7-People programme. In order to face the wide range of challenges that the industrial-scale wave energy implementation faces in the near future, the Wavetrain2 program will be focusing on technical issues, from hydrodynamic and PTO design, to instrumentation issues and energy storage and cost reduction, as they show to be critical for successful deployment. However, also non-technical ´barriers´, typically less tangible difficulties related to legal issues (licensing, conflicts of use, EIA procedures, grid connection, regional differences) and the nonsufficient representation of socio-economic benefits of the sector, will be dealt with.

The network consists of 13 European partner institutions and 17 associated entities, from research units and device developers to project developers and consultants.