Ocean environment of Orkney replicated
Two of the world’s leading ocean energy test centres have joined forces to replicate the wild ocean environment of Orkney in a state-of-the-art test facility in Edinburgh.
The project, a collaboration between the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney and FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility at the University of Edinburgh, began in 2012 with the aim of substantially improving the accuracy of replicating open ocean conditions at tank scale.
FloWave is a 25 metre circular test tank which is the only facility in the world with the capability to generate complex waves and fast tidal currents from any point of the compass.
After three years of work by Sam Draycott – a dedicated research engineer working at FloWave – and the support of the highly experienced team at EMEC, FloWave can now accurately replicate individual project site locations within the tank to a level of sophistication and complexity not possible anywhere else in the world.
Making full use of both the 10-year plus data-set from EMEC’s Billia Croo offshore test site and the multi-directional wave and current capability of the FloWave test tank, the new technique has already been trialled and tested by engineering consultants Quoceant, a company with significant experience in testing in real wave climates, and at Billia Croo in particular.
Neil Kermode, managing director of EMEC said: “FloWave has done a great job at integrating our data into their test tank, and I’m delighted to hear that Quoceant has been able to trial this. The open ocean is an expensive place for developers to learn hard lessons so realising the conditions experienced at EMEC in a tank should help iron out some issues before they come to deploy at sea.”