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Press Release: EMEC issue dry testing performance statement to CorPower

The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) Ltd have issued a performance statement following dry testing of CorPower’s wave energy converter (WEC) in Stockholm.CorPower Logo

The testing involved the dry testing of CorPower’s power take-off (PTO) on the Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) test rig, specifically designed for the purposes of testing the PTO onshore as part of the Wave Energy Scotland (WES) funded Hi-Drive project.

The purpose of the Hardware-In-Loop (HIL) rig is to enable onshore testing and provide verification of WEC machinery subsystems before deployment. The rig emulates loads and motions representative of a complete range of expected sea-states.

As a verification body, EMEC has well-developed method and validation process in place to ensure strict quality management and quality assurance of the verification process. This involves reviewing the test plan and methodologies prior to commencing the tests, witnessing the tests, and reviewing the test report and test data for accuracy and completeness.

The performance statement covers both the PTO and HIL rig performance.

Performed over seven months, the dry test programme included 708 registered test runs, with 378 signals being measured providing more than 1 TB of data on the equipment. Each specified function was tested starting with gentle loading, allowing safety and machine control to be verified while stabilising the operation.

Having built confidence at low sea states, the loading was gradually ramped up verifying the performance on a range of operations up to full range storm waves. The innovative WaveSpring phase control method was verified, with sub-system efficiency of 99 % at rated loading. The test campaign was finalised with a two week non-interrupted test.

Following the dry tests in Sweden, CorPower’s WEC – named C3 – was transported to Orkney. The half-scale WEC was deployed in January 2018 at EMEC’s scale test site at Scapa Flow in Orkney with support from the Interreg_NWE FORESEA programme.

CorPower intend to wrap up the C3 tests this summer and will incorporate the learning from the wet tests into the development of their next generation WEC technology. This is part of the Horizon 2020 funded project – WaveBoost and the full scale HiWave-5 project.

The HIL-rig will also be used within the WaveBoost project to verify next generation design.

Elaine Buck, Technical Manager, EMEC, said:

“EMEC were impressed with the dry testing programme undertaken by CorPower as part of their WES project, and has been used to derive lessons learnt and provide enhanced projections of the performance of the next iteration full-scale WEC – the C4.”

Patrik Möller, CEO, CorPower, said:

“We are delighted with the results of the C3 dry test campaign and model calibration. Looking to the future we are confident that CorPower’s full scale WEC’s will deliver five times more energy per ton and three times more energy per force compared to current state-of-the-art devices, bringing the structural efficiency of wave energy to a similar level as a modern wind turbine.”

Jean-Michel Chauvet, Director Integration & test, CorPower, said:

“The level of detailed characterization of the equipment enabled by controlled dry testing with computer generated wave loading has provided accelerated learning which has helped us to deliver a reliable WEC before deploying it in the ocean. We consider dry testing a critical part also in our next full-scale program for the C4 WEC.”

Tim Hurst, CEO, Wave Energy Scotland, said:

“This kind of rigorous testing is essential to verifying the performance of a PTO technology and helps us to reduce risk before moving to the real sea testing environment. CorPower is setting an excellent example to successors following the same thorough approach.”

The interior and exterior view of the dry testing of CorPower’s power take-off (PTO) on the Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) test rig can be viewed in the video below.

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