Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Design Optimization of a Structurally Flexible Wave Energy Converter with a Direct Search Algorithm

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/gt54kv629

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  • Several wave energy converter designs have been recently proposed that are made of flexible materials. Flexible devices are able to generate electricity by being stretched, and are intended to simplify deployment and maintenance concerns over existing wave energy devices. Due to the relative infancy of flexible wave energy converters, however, little is known about how to optimally design one for its deployment location. We chose here to optimize a long flexible tube, a seemingly straightforward design nonetheless having a large design space including geometry, submergence, material, and mooring considerations. A brute force search of all these factors would take engineers an impractical amount of time to completely explore, so we used a direct search optimization algorithm to explore potential design concept changes and exploit those that result in an overall improvement. We focused on the geometry and submergence of the flexible device with fixed mooring and material parameters, and successfully used the device’s overall power performance as our metric for improvement. We intend our optimization work to be a case study in using design automation and optimization methods to improve other flexible wave energy devices.
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