System Design and Operation: Applied Ocean Current Turbine Design

Led by: William Baxley, MS, PE
Affiliated Home Campus: Harbor Branch
Affiliated Department: Southeast National Marine Renewable Energy Center

The proposed project includes the planning and specialized equipment design for the mooring, deployment, and recovery/maintenance activities relating to underwater Ocean Current Turbines (OCTs). Previous work on the OCTs and their control systems focused on the hydrodynamic forces that could rotate the device and cause vertical and horizontal excursions from an ideal position in the flow. Since maximum electrical power is created when OCTs are perpendicular to the flow, maintaining this orientation is vital to maximizing power production. The control of an OCT's location within the water column is also important, so that the system may move into depths where the flows are maximum and adjust to temporal variations in this depth. To function, however, the OCT must be securely attached to the seafloor through a mooring system that is tailored to the bottom type, water depth, and velocity profiles for the deployment location. The proposed project will build upon previous SNMREC work (see “2020-2022 Projects and Participants” on this website) and will immerse the participants in the design of a mooring system and all associated procedures to install, maintain, and recover an OCT. It will also require participants to deepen their understanding of fluid dynamics, computer modeling, hydraulic and electric machine design, computer control, and instrumentation topics. Scaled prototypes of specialized tools would be built and tested using 3D printing technologies, along with microcontroller boards and electromechanical components. Software would include SolidWorks and Orcaflex, a finite element cable modelling software package used for mooring simulations. This project would lead to eventual full-scale systems and detailed procedures in support of OCTs and the ocean energy community.