Much like wind energy in its early years, marine energy has vast potential, and wave energy converter (WEC) concepts are constantly in development. Consequently, wave energy faces many challenges for expansion and has a wide-ranging design space of WEC concepts. The large design space demands new methods for understanding the...
Wave energy research and development has been ongoing in Oregon for at least two decades. Substantial interest started in the early 2000’s, flattened in the 2010’s, and is on the rise again. The Oregon wave energy sector recently experienced several sizable developments in 2020 and 2021, making this a critical...
Wave energy has the potential to power large and small factions of economies around the world alike. Current methods for determining the amount of wave energy resource available to wave energy converter (WEC) devices entail capturing the look of the sea state at large by presenting characteristic wave heights, periods,...
North America’s West Coast represents some of the highest global potentials for wave energy output. We developed and conducted a survey of a sample of residents (N=2000) in California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia matched on gender, age, race, and education to the general population. Respondents were asked how much...
The Pacific Northwest of the United States is characterized by one of the greatest annual mean wave power resources in the world. As a result, the wave energy resource offshore of Oregon has been characterized, through hindcast models and physical buoy data, throughout the past decade. Over the past 8...
Realizing the vast amount of energy available in ocean waves, an industry has emerged that is progressing towards the deployment of grid–connected wave energy converters. Likely to be deployed in arrays, a challenge to the wave energy industry is maximizing the energy production of such arrays. We have been developing...
Resulting from the action of wind over open water surfaces, water waves contain colossal amounts of energy that has not yet been harnessed. Seen as a very promising source for renewable energy generation, many studies have tried to make wave energy a cost competitive source by investigating optimal designs of...
This dissertation studies the coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) of a wave energy converter (WEC) and evaluates the design of a WEC mooring system. The research is conducted in support of conceptual development, field test and performance evaluation of WECs as part of the mission of the Northwest National Marine Renewable...
Recently, there has been peaked interest in developing high energy producing and optimized power take-off topologies for Wave Energy Converters (WEC). As large as the potential of the oceans may seem, harnessing that energy and effectively converting it to electricity in significant amounts is a challenge. Currently, there are no...
The central Oregon coast was selected as an ideal site for wave energy
development and establishment of the Pacific Marine Energy Center (PMEC). PMEC will consist of two nearshore sites, one north (NETS) and one south (SETS) of the Yaquina River, Oregon. Our study aims to assess how the development...