Design and economic analysis assessment of multi-use hybrid offshore Wind and Wave energy systems

Design and economic analysis assessment of multi-use hybrid offshore Wind and Wave energy systems The present thesis aims to develop a preliminary assessment of a hybrid wave and wind offshore energy system. At the starting point benchmark research of technologies related to floating offshore wind turbine (FWOT) and wave energy converter (WEC), was made to obtain main technical data concerning each functionality. Afterwards the paper's theme shifted on the preliminary dimensioning project. Two commercialized FWOT platforms was selected: Nautilus and Spiderfloat, and their original design was modelled to support a 10 MW size wind turbine, in addition a point absorber called Reference Model 3 (RM3) was selected as WEC devices to be implemented as a semi structural component of the FWOT platform. The entire system was first analysed hydrostatically. The overall system reached the Hydrodynamic stability, verified through using CAD tools as Solidworks and computational software as Excel. Therefore the study focused to perform the hydrodynamic analysis, with the support of ANSYS AQWA a boundary element method (BEM) software. Thenceforth MATLAB Simulink was implemented to simulate the entire functionality of the hybrid system . As final result an economic study has been prepared for the implementation on site in Mediterranean Sea near the cost of Pantelleria's Island. And the levelized cost of energy (LOCE) in euro per Mwatt hour (€/MWh), was estimated.