Hydraulic PTO model emulator for WEC tank tests

In order to accelerate the overall power take off (PTO) design effort and to cheaply evaluate alternative designs, the construction of the real hydraulic PTO can be replaced with the design of a hydraulic PTO model emulator. This has the added advantage that it can be applied at model testing scales, where real hydraulic hardware would not give performance, representative of the full scale PTO (most likely, the scale PTO hardware and the full PTO hardware would be completely different but, even if similar, the operating points and performance would be very dissimilar). Finally, and most importantly for this work, the emulated PTO presents realistic interface to the controller while the emulated force signals are actuated by an electric motor. This paper reports the main results from a collaborative project between Wave Venture Ltd. and SANDIA National Laboratories, focused on the development of a hydraulic PTO model emulator, in order to carry out wave tank tests with the new SANDIA wave energy converter (WEC).