Following on from successful developments in 2016 Wave Energy Scotland an arm of the Scottish Government has announced a further award to accelerate the development of Anaconda. This award of 730k places Anaconda firmly on the map as one of the leading cost efficient, new generation of wave energy convertors.
Below is an extract from the WES website:
The WES Stage 2 project will build on the results achieved during Stage 1 with an engineering work programme focused on a lower risk ‘Mk1’ baseline configuration and concepts for a more advanced ‘MkX’ version. The Mk1 design is intended for the first array-series Anaconda WECs. The MkX will include further step change technologies offering improved economic potential in the longer term. This Stage 2 programme balances the near-term risks with the longer term potential for the technology.
The engineering programme will focus on advancing the Mk1 for sub-scale sea prototype deployment in Stage 3 and in particular the technology readiness of the fundamental tube absorber technology. This work will progress the lower novelty Mk1 baseline device successfully developed in Stage 1. It will include detailed structural design assessments, subsystem engineering and an assessment of hysteresis impacts of using rubber. It will also cover further design work on local structural details to assess their resilience in fatigue and ultimate loading conditions. The programme will produce a feasibility assessment of a full-scale device and a FEED of rubber structures for sub-scale Stage 3 sea trials. A large-scale rubber manufacturer, Contitech, with an interest in providing components for future stages will join the team.
The simulation and testing programme will focus on acquiring loads information to guide the design of the full scale and sub-scale sea-going prototypes, as well as addressing the remaining uncertainty in the Mk1 absorber tube performance estimates. It also includes study and validation of an entirely new experimental PTO with fast, active control of the bulge tube interface. This work will help to understand the ultimate absorption potential of Anaconda. It will validate a numerical model of the Anaconda such that performance optimisation will no longer depend only on experimentally measured results. The advanced engineering work on MkX will probably also find application on determining desirable design features for the more passively controlled Mk1 PTO system.