Ricerc@Sapienza

To advance commercialisation of ocean wave energy and for the technology to become competitive with other sources of renewable energy, the cost of wave energy harvesting should be significantly reduced. The Mediterranean Sea is a region with a relatively low wave energy potential, but due to the absence of extreme waves, can be considered at the initial stage of the prototype development as a proof of concept. In this study, we focus on the optimisation of a multi-mode wave energy converter inspired by the CETO system to be tested in the west of Sicily, Italy.

The aim of the paper is to preliminary analyse the performance of several nearshore Wave Energy Converters (WEC) sited in the west coast of Sicily close to the Favignana island's shorelines. In particular, the four WEC technologies that have been considered are Wave Star, Oyster, Wave Dragon and Archimedes Wave Swing. The power performance assessment has been developed through the comparison of various scaled versions of the WEC using a proved scaling process based on the Froude similitude.