ParaResWEC project


The title of this project is ‘Nonlinear Rock and Roll – Modelling and Control of Parametric Resonance in Wave Energy Converters’. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The over-arching aim of the project is to catalyse increased research into parametric resonance (PR) within wave energy and other offshore renewable energy fields.

The concept of resonance is well known in the study of wave energy converters (WECs). In comparison, PR has received virtually no attention, and is often unexpected since it is a nonlinear phenomenon not predicted by the linear/frequency domain models traditionally favoured in WEC research and analysis. Whereas normal resonance causes the oscillations of a system to grow linearly with time, PR causes an exponential increase in oscillation amplitude, and therefore has great potential to be either detrimental or beneficial to a WEC performance. For certain classes of WECs, PR can lead WEC instability and decreased performance, by transferring energy from the primary mode of motion into other modes. Alternatively, for other types of WECs designed to extract power from the parametrically resonating modes of motion, triggering PR could result in increased energy capture and represent a game-changing approach to improving WEC performance.

Principal investigator

Dr Josh Davidson is the principal investigator (PI) for the ParaResWEC project, being awarded a Widening Fellowship under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships programme to promote a two-way knowledge transfer between Dr Davidson and the Dept of Fluid Mechanics at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. A link to Dr Davidson''s homepage is provided in the navigation tab at the top of the page.

Website

Navigate the project website with the tabs at the top of the page to explore the published research produced by the project, the student projects supervised during the course of the project, a blog providing news and updates from the project and links to external repositories hosting videos, open-source code and data generated by the project.