Mechanical design of the Ocean Grazer's floater blanket

Nowadays, global warming is in the order of the day, as the majority of the countries are experiencing heat waves and other insalubrious atmospheric phenomena continuously. Some countries in Europe, such as United Kingdom, have recently broken historic high temperature records in winter months, wher...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Vidal I Mauricio, Sergi
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/184100
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/184100
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Global warming
Tidal power
Escalfament global
Energia maremotriu
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria mecànica
Descripción
Sumario:Nowadays, global warming is in the order of the day, as the majority of the countries are experiencing heat waves and other insalubrious atmospheric phenomena continuously. Some countries in Europe, such as United Kingdom, have recently broken historic high temperature records in winter months, where it is stated that it is the first time registered that they have overcome the 20oC barrier in February. Also, mean temperature has increased of more than 2 oC in more than 80% of the territory in the last 30 years (Met Office, 2019). The consequences of the climate change are so imminent that world-renowned institutions have changed their vision about how can it be tackled, since they now speak about minimising its effects instead of preventing it. Therefore, it is crucial to leave non-renewable energy resources behind or, at least, reduce their use worldwide as much as possible. To do so, Ocean Grazer is a highly-innovative novel technology that pretends to implement a system combining wind and wave power extraction and storage units in order to provide green energy and deliver it to grid according to the demand. In other words, what Ocean Grazer will do is to provide us with electricity coming from renewable energies so that we are able to have a more sustainable future. The purpose of this thesis is to build a model as realistic as possible which is able to maintain the separation between the floaters in a 3D model with an eighteen floater array. To accomplish this objective several models composed of different types of constraints or joints between the hydrodynamic bodies will be simulated. With these simulations, carried out in time domain, the reactions in these constraints, the average power extracted and the displacements of the bodies will be obtained and analysed. Moreover, several issues will be faced, as the asymmetry in power extraction, the instability due to the connections between the pistons and the floaters and the power loss due to the flexibility of these connections