The low-friction WEC testbed design was completed in April 2023 and tested in MTU Wave. It’s now being used to explore control system strategies for heaving point absorbers. The voice coil PTO and air bearings result in nearly zero friction allowing us to focus on the hydrodynamic response. A Michigan Tech capstone team designed the system.
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Jacob, Sal, Hassan, and Gordon recently published the “Free-Decay Heave Motion of a Spherical Buoy” in Fluids. The buoy response was explored using experimental measurements and complementary numerical simulations. The experiments were performed using MTU Wave’s Qualisys motion-capture system and wave gauges. The simulations included three sets of calculations with varying levels of sophistication. In one set, the volume-of-fluid (VOF) method was used to solve the incompressible, two-phase, Navier–Stokes equations on an overset grid, whereas…