Harnessing the power of ocean waves to generate electricity has long been a goal for advocates of clean and renewable energy. Engineers at Carnegie Clean Energy took a major step toward realizing that goal with the Perth Wave Energy Project (PWEP), the world’s only currently operating grid-connected wave energy array. The project demonstrates the viability of the company’s CETO technology, which generates power from ocean swell via submerged buoys. Pumps actuated by the motion of the 11-meter-in-diameter buoys pressurize water to drive hydroelectric conversion devices, generating up to 240 kW of zero-emission electricity.
Carnegie engineers used Simulink®to simulate a virtual prototype of the CETO 5 technology.
“It would be horrendously complex to build a scale model of our full system for all the different variants we considered in the design phase,” says Jonathan Fiévez, chief technology officer at Carnegie. “With Simulink and SimHydraulics we built virtual prototypes that enable us to predict system performance under various sea conditions, simulate failure cases, and analyze loads so we can select the best design and accurately specify component requirements to our suppliers.”