The HiDrive power-take-off (PTO) technology will undergo a dry test period for five months in Stockholm before being transported to Orkney for a five-month program of cyclical dry and wet testing.
The pilot program follows CorPower’s success in Wave Energy Scotland’s (WES) PTO call last year.
It forms a part of WES PTO call that, combined with funding from KIC InnoEnergy and the Swedish Energy Agency, completes a €6.5m funding round for dry rig testing of a half scale prototype system followed by an ocean deployment at EMEC’s scale test site in Scapa Flow.
As part of the testing program, a bespoke dry test rig will be installed at EMEC for hardware-in-the-loop testing.
The test rig will have the ability to subject wave devices to the full range of wave loads corresponding to the most challenging sea states, the company said.
EMEC managing director Neil Kermode said: "This is a particularly exciting project for EMEC as it includes the installation of additional infrastructure – a PTO dry test rig – near the Scapa Flow wave test site. This test rig will act as a lasting legacy of Corpower’s test programme and WES’ foresight, as it will be available to support the development of other wave and tidal energy converters in the future."
The PTO technology featuring CorPower’s WaveSpring control technology is claimed to provide performance improvement to the wave energy sector.
It will be taken through a program of structured verification guided by EMEC, alongside Iberdrola Engineering, the University of Edinburgh, and WavEC Offshore Renewables.
Image: CorPower Ocean have signed up to test their novel wave energy converter at EMEC in Orkney. Photo: courtesy of CorPower.
