Development of an Adaptable Monitoring Package for Marine Renewable Energy Projects Part Ii: Hydrodynamic Performance

The Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP), along with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and custom tool skid, is being developed to support near-field (≤10 meters) monitoring of hydrokinetic energy converters. The AMP is intended to support a wide range of environmental monitoring in harsh oceanographic conditions, at a cost in line with other aspects of technology demonstrations. This paper, which is the second in a two part series, covers the hydrodynamic analysis of the AMP and deployment ROV given the strong waves and currents that typify marine renewable energy sites. Hydrodynamic conditions from the Pacific Marine Energy Center’s wave test sites (PMEC) and Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound, Washington are considered as early adoption case studies. A methodology is presented to increase the AMP’s capabilities by optimizing its drag profile through a combination of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling and sub-scale experiments. Preliminary results suggest that AMP deployments should be possible in turbulent environments with a mean flow velocity up to 1 m/s. ∗Corresponding Author: [email protected] INTRODUCTION As technology advances bring marine renewable energy converters closer to commercial deployment, capabilities are needed to monitor and characterize environmental changes. Environmental information gathered from the monitoring of early demonstration projects will inform system refinements and sustainable, commercial implementations. The cost to obtain this information must, however, be proportional to the benefit realized and in-line with realistic demonstration project costs. While much of the instrumentation to characterize environmental changes exists, or is in an advanced stage of development, the infrastructure for deploying and maintaining instrumentation, in particular cabled instrumentation, at marine energy sites has not received significant attention [1–4]. We are developing two systems to enhance capabilities and reduce costs for environmental research: 1) an Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP) to integrate a flexible suite of instrumentation into a single, streamlined body and 2) the infrastructure to allow an inspection class ROV and custom tool skid to deploy the AMP in the energetic conditions typical of marine energy sites. Figure 1 shows the current design model of the AMP mounted to the SeaEye Falcon deployment ROV and custom tool skid referred to as the “Millennium.” The first part of the talk in this two paper series describes the system components and layout [5]. Two projects that are likely to be early adopters of this ap-