Development and Validation of Passive Yaw in the Open-Source WEC-Sim Code

Author(s):  
Dominic D. Forbush ◽  
Kelley Ruehl ◽  
David Ogden ◽  
Jennifer van Rij ◽  
Yi-Hsiang Yu ◽  
...  

Abstract A passive yaw implementation is developed, validated, and explored for the WEC-Sim, an open-source wave energy converter modeling tool that works within MATLAB/Simulink. The Reference Model 5 (RM5) is selected for this investigation, and a WEC-Sim model of the device is modified to allow yaw motion. A boundary element method (BEM) code was used to calculate the excitation force coefficients for a range of wave headings. An algorithm was implemented in WEC-Sim to determine the equivalent wave heading from a body’s instantaneous yaw angle and interpolate the appropriate excitation coefficients to ensure the correct time-domain excitation force. This approach is able to determine excitation force for a body undergoing large yaw displacement. For the mathematically simple case of regular wave excitation, the dynamic equation was integrated numerically and found to closely approximate the results from this implementation in WEC-Sim. A case study is presented for the same device in irregular waves. In this case, computation time is increased by 32x when this interpolation is performed at every time step. To reduce this expense, a threshold yaw displacement can be set to reduce the number of interpolations performed. A threshold of 0.01° was found to increase computation time by only 22x without significantly affecting time domain results. Similar amplitude spectra for yaw force and displacements are observed for all threshold values less than 1°, for which computation time is only increased by 2.2x.

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jui-Hsiang Kao

This research develops an Advance-Tracing Boundary Element Method in the time domain to calculate the waves that radiate from an immersed obstacle moving with random acceleration. The moving velocity of the immersed obstacle is multifrequency and is projected along the normal direction of every element on the obstacle. The projected normal velocity of every element is presented by the Fourier series and includes the advance-tracing time, which is equal to a quarter period of the moving velocity. The moving velocity is treated as a known boundary condition. The computing scheme is based on the boundary integral equation in the time domain, and the approach process is carried forward in a loop from the first time step to the last. At each time step, the radiated pressure on each element is updated until obtaining a convergent result. The Advance-Tracing Boundary Element Method is suitable for calculating the radiating problem from an arbitrary obstacle moving with random acceleration in the time domain and can be widely applied to the shape design of an immersed obstacle in order to attain security and confidentiality.


Author(s):  
Mohamed Abdelsabour Fahmy

AbstractThe main aim of this article is to develop a new boundary element method (BEM) algorithm to model and simulate the nonlinear thermal stresses problems in micropolar functionally graded anisotropic (FGA) composites with temperature-dependent properties. Some inside points are chosen to treat the nonlinear terms and domain integrals. An integral formulation which is based on the use of Kirchhoff transformation is firstly used to simplify the transient heat conduction governing equation. Then, the residual nonlinear terms are carried out within the current formulation. The domain integrals can be effectively treated by applying the Cartesian transformation method (CTM). In the proposed BEM technique, the nonlinear temperature is computed on the boundary and some inside domain integral. Then, nonlinear displacement can be calculated at each time step. With the calculated temperature and displacement distributions, we can obtain the values of nonlinear thermal stresses. The efficiency of our proposed methodology has been improved by using the communication-avoiding versions of the Arnoldi (CA-Arnoldi) preconditioner for solving the resulting linear systems arising from the BEM to reduce the iterations number and computation time. The numerical outcomes establish the influence of temperature-dependent properties on the nonlinear temperature distribution, and investigate the effect of the functionally graded parameter on the nonlinear displacements and thermal stresses, through the micropolar FGA composites with temperature-dependent properties. These numerical outcomes also confirm the validity, precision and effectiveness of the proposed modeling and simulation methodology.


Author(s):  
Niels Hørbye Christiansen ◽  
Per Erlend Torbergsen Voie ◽  
Jan Høgsberg ◽  
Nils Sødahl

Dynamic analyses of slender marine structures are computationally expensive. Recently it has been shown how a hybrid method which combines FEM models and artificial neural networks (ANN) can be used to reduce the computation time spend on the time domain simulations associated with fatigue analysis of mooring lines by two orders of magnitude. The present study shows how an ANN trained to perform nonlinear dynamic response simulation can be optimized using a method known as optimal brain damage (OBD) and thereby be used to rank the importance of all analysis input. Both the training and the optimization of the ANN are based on one short time domain simulation sequence generated by a FEM model of the structure. This means that it is possible to evaluate the importance of input parameters based on this single simulation only. The method is tested on a numerical model of mooring lines on a floating off-shore installation. It is shown that it is possible to estimate the cost of ignoring one or more input variables in an analysis.


Author(s):  
Meyer Nahon

Abstract The rapid determination of the minimum distance between objects is of importance in collision avoidance for a robot maneuvering among obstacles. Currently, the fastest algorithms for the solution of this problem are based on the use of optimization techniques to minimize a distance function. Furthermore, to date this problem has been approached purely through the position kinematics of the two objects. However, although the minimum distance between two objects can be found quickly on state-of-the-art hardware, the modelling of realistic scenes entails the determination of the minimum distances between large numbers of pairs of objects, and the computation time to calculate the overall minimum distance between any two objects is significant, and introduces a delay which has serious repercussions on the real-time control of the robot. This paper presents a technique to modify the original optimization problem in order to include velocity information. In effect, the minimum distance calculation is performed at a future time step by projecting the effect of present velocity. This method has proven to give good results on a 6-dof robot maneuvering among obstacles, and has allowed a complete compensation of the lags incurred due to computational delays.


Author(s):  
Dennis Robertson ◽  
Patrick O'Donnell ◽  
Benjamin Lawler ◽  
Robert Prucka

Abstract Several combustion strategies leverage radial fuel stratification to adapt combustion performance between the center of the chamber and the outer regions independently. Spark-assisted compression ignition (SACI) relies on careful tuning of this radial stratification to maximize the combined performance of flame propagation and autoignition. Established techniques for determining in-cylinder fuel stratification are computationally intensive, limiting their feasibility for control strategy development and real-time control. A simplified model for radial fuel stratification is developed for control-oriented objectives. The model consists of three submodels: spray penetration, fuel distribution along the spray axis, and post-injection mixing. The spray penetration model is adapted from fuel spray models presented in the literature. The fuel distribution and mixing submodels are validated against injection spray results from an LES 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) reference model for three test points as a function of crank angle. The quasi-one-dimensional model matches the CFD results with a root mean square error (RMSE) for equivalence ratio of 0.08?0.11. This is a 50% reduction from the 0.16?0.20 RMSE for a model that assumes a uniform fuel distribution immediately after injection. The computation time is 230 ms on an Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 to solve each case without significant optimization for code execution speed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 2153-2165 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Uhlenbrook ◽  
Y. Mohamed ◽  
A. S. Gragne

Abstract. Understanding catchment hydrological processes is essential for water resources management, in particular in data scarce regions. The Gilgel Abay catchment (a major tributary into Lake Tana, source of the Blue Nile) is undergoing intensive plans for water management, which is part of larger development plans in the Blue Nile basin in Ethiopia. To obtain a better understanding of the water balance dynamics and runoff generation mechanisms and to evaluate model transferability, catchment modeling has been conducted using the conceptual hydrological model HBV. Accordingly, the catchment of the Gilgel Abay has been divided into two gauged sub-catchments (Upper Gilgel Abay and Koga) and the un-gauged part of the catchment. All available data sets were tested for stationarity, consistency and homogeneity and the data limitations (quality and quantity) are discussed. Manual calibration of the daily models for three different catchment representations, i.e. (i) lumped, (ii) lumped with multiple vegetation zones, and (iii) semi-distributed with multiple vegetation and elevation zones, showed good to satisfactory model performances with Nash-Sutcliffe efficiencies Reff > 0.75 and > 0.6 for the Upper Gilgel Abay and Koga sub-catchments, respectively. Better model results could not be obtained with manual calibration, very likely due to the limited data quality and model insufficiencies. Increasing the computation time step to 15 and 30 days improved the model performance in both sub-catchments to Reff > 0.8. Model parameter transferability tests have been conducted by interchanging parameters sets between the two gauged sub-catchments. Results showed poor performances for the daily models (0.30 < Reff < 0.67), but better performances for the 15 and 30 days models, Reff > 0.80. The transferability tests together with a sensitivity analysis using Monte Carlo simulations (more than 1 million model runs per catchment representation) explained the different hydrologic responses of the two sub-catchments, which seems to be mainly caused by the presence of dambos in Koga sub-catchment. It is concluded that daily model transferability is not feasible, while it can produce acceptable results for the 15 and 30 days models. This is very useful for water resources planning and management, but not sufficient to capture detailed hydrological processes in an ungauged area.


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