Special Services

 
ES-Consult has since its establishment completed several tasks related to important civil and structural works and has also carried out many special assignments in the category of applied sience. A very important part of the activities of the firm has been assistance and technical consultances to building- and infrastructure owners.
Here follows descriptions of a series of ES-Consult's special services.

 

 

Offshore Wave Power Devices

Introduction

ES-Consult has in several cases participated in projects concerning utilization of natural power sources. The firm has thus been involved in projects for plants for production of wave power. The tasks of the firm have concentrated in particular on development of structures that are able to resist the very severe wave loads to which they are exposed and are economically acceptable.

Special Assignments

ES-Consult has carried out a quality assurance of the structures for a power producing plant situated 2 km outside the Hanstholm harbour in Jutland at 30 m depth of water for the firm Danish Wave Power.
In this connection it appeared to be  most appropriate to simulate the wave movements by harmonic expressions and to evaluate the action on the swimmer of the plant from simple buoyancy considerations. Hereby the severe loads on the structure could be predicted by a relatively simple analysis.
The above mentioned plant was not realized for financial reasons, but it was decided to build a smaller plant. This plant was, by means of more complicated computational models developed by ES-Consult, optimized and dimensioned to resist the worst possible waves outside Hanstholm harbour - i.e. waves with a height of about 12 m. The computational models were used to dimension both the structures and the foundations, and at the same time they formed the basis for the calculation of the power production.
In a continuation of the project the firm has participated in a research project (OWEC-1) under EU's Joule program. Here ES-Consult has contributed with computational tools for the estimation of the production of power and for the analyses of the structures for four different wave power producing plants.
The computational models are implemented in user-friendly computer programmes, which can be run on an ordinary PC. Hereby it is possible to optimize a given plant in a relatively simple way with respect to a given position and the nature of the waves.

Special Results

The accuracy of the computational models is verified partly by measurements on the plant outside Hanstholm and partly by comparisons with models developed by other participants in the Joule project.

Litterature

ES-Consult has participated with contributions at two conferences in wave power and has contributed to the Joule project with description of the mathematical models.
 

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Simulation of offshore wave power device