[E&E seminars] Lectures in wave energy

[Karen Gibson]

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Lecture series on Wave Energy

SPEAKER: Prof. Antonio Sarmento
     Director, Center for Wave Energy Research
     Institute of Advanced Technologies
     University of Lisbon, Portugal


Date/Time:  February 11, 13, and 15 (MWF), 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Location:  Room 1-390



Hosted by Professor Chiang C. Mei
Civil & Environmetal Engineering
ccmei at mit.edu




             Feb 11: Wave energy: from demonstration to  
commercialization
Wave energy is now at the phase of demonstration of pilot plants and  
prototypes at the sea. However a significant number of actions need  
to be taken to go from here to full commercialization. The talk will  
describe the state-of-the-art of the technology and main players and  
will present the challenges, risks and barriers to be overcome before  
commercialization is attained. Public policies being set-up in  
different European state-members to support this development will  
also be addressed. Special emphasis will be given to the economics of  
wave energy and its financing, in particular through the feed-in tariff.

             Feb 13: Operational experience with the 400 kW OWC power  
plant in the island of Pico, Azores
Built in 1999 the Pico plant suffered from typical early stage  
technology problems which resulted in its almost abandon before its  
refurbishment between 2004 and 2006. The talk will describe the  
technological problems and solutions to these and will present  
operational data related to energy production, flow rate and pressure  
drop across turbine, stability of energy supply to the grid, etc.

Feb 15: Design considerations of heaving axissimetric wave energy  
converters

There is presently a number of heaving axissimetric wave energy  
converters (WECs) being developed by different companies due to their  
relative compactness. The working principle of these WECs is  
relatively simple and can be well understood under linear wave  
theory. The talk will review briefly the main theoretical results and  
will discuss how these theoretical results may be used to improve the  
design of these WECs in order to widen their frequency response,  
increase their rated power and facilitate their engineering.






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