The VALID consortium gathered in person last month for a two-day workshop at The Technical University of Denmark. The meeting was a chance for European partners to offer feedback on the latest updates within several work packages, as well as to see Wavepiston’s test rig in person. Most importantly, it marked the first time project partners have successfully coupled a component test rig to a Wave2Wire model with a feedback loop.
Day one began with a tour of DTU’s lab outside of Copenhagen. An engineer from AVL—a VALID partner tasked with adapting its hybrid testing solutions used in the automotive industry to wave energy—had been on site all week, performing the commissioning of AVL’s commercial solution for hybrid testing – Testbed.CONNECTTM, and supporting DTU in running the first basic open- and closed-loop tests.
As part of the tour, one of VALID’s three user cases, Wavepiston, demonstrated their test rig and initial close-loop hybrid test at DTU’s testing facility.
Since starting testing in October of 2022, the team has completed over 500,000 displacement cycles in accelerated testing with only expected leaks and no major issues. The next step, incorporating virtual modelling to transition to full-scale hybrid testing, is expected to start this summer.
“Following a few minor modifications and enhancements, the Wavepiston team has been able to run the initial closed-loop hybrid tests successfully. We have validated the setup and we are confident that it will be successful during the full-scale hybrid testing that is planned to begin in June this year,” Troels Lukassen, Development Engineer at Wavepiston, said.
Photos courtesy of Wavepiston
The remainder of the morning included presentations on the challenges of hybrid testing and co-simulation by Aalborg University, and scaling effects by Wavepiston and CorPower. The group also discussed uncertainty quantification in hybrid testing, led by RISE, and test plan guidance, led by YavinFour. This was followed with a presentation by AVL on virtual and hardware pathways.
On day two of the workshop, Tecnalia and energy consultant Julia Fernandez Chozas had the opportunity to present on stage-gate metrics and the approaches to cost assessment of the critical component’s reliability. Finally, RISE led a discussion on the environmental effects on wave energy devices, like marine growth and corrosion.
The workshop served as a crucial opportunity for key partners, including DTU, Wavepiston, AAU and AVL, to demonstrate in-person what has evolved out of their combined efforts in developing a novel hybrid test platform for wave energy.