Labs & Tools

We have multiple tools that help us improve our research in offshore renewable energy.

If you are interested in working with any of them, please let us now.

Electrical

  • Electrical PTO Lab: A turbine emulator to reproduce the mechanical output of an ocean energy device/wind turbine. FREE ACCESS THROUGH MARINET2 Project.
  • Thor: 1.25 MVA up to 6 MVA Flexible grid to test power electronic equipment.
  • InGRID: New experimental infrastructure for smart grids.
  • PHIL: Power Hardware-In-The-Loop test bench composed by a real time digital simulator from OPAL, a Double F5150 power amplifier (6 voltage sources and 6 current sources) for testing of protection, control and metering equipment and one three-phase 2 kVA Pacific Power AMX 320 power source for testing power equipment.
  • Omicron CMC256plus and CMC156: for automatic testing of protection, control and metering equipment.
  • Ballard Nexa: 1.2 kW fuel-cell test bench for cogeneration and microgrid applications.
  • APERT Lab: Fully equipped laboratory for Power Electronics.

Flumes

Our labs contain valuable offshore renewable energy research tools such as short and long wave flumes:

  • Short 2D wave flume: (Width x Height x Length) 0.4 x 0.5 x 3 m. It is a short 2D wave flume equipped with piston-type wave maker, with a maximum stroke amplitude of 0.180 m, pebble-bed passive extinction system, and 2 ultrasonic-type wave probes. It is designed to test primary hydrodynamic responses of initial WEC and floating structures designs under wave excitation.
  •  Long 2D wave and current flume: (Width x Height x Length: 0.6 x 0.7 x 13 m). It is a medium/long 2D wave flume equipped with a piston-type wavemaker, active and passive extinction systems and several wave probe types for parametric design studies of fixed and floating WEC systems. Water recirculation available.

Computation resources

  • Supercomputation Cluster ARINA: HPC (High Performance Computing) Cluster: 320  Itanium2 and Opteron Cores.
  • HIPATIA: Cluster – 624 cores, 4'3TB of RAM and 50TB of scratch space.
  • 2 work stations (Intel Xeon processor E5-2640 v4 2.4 GHz and 128 Gb RAM) + 1 NAS for data storage (9 Tb).

External resources

We have access to worldwide computation and renewable energy research tools and resources, such as the i2Basque HPC Cluster with 1072 cores, 1,27TB of RAM an 24TB of space.

Software

  • Software PSS/E: comercial license of the Power System Simulator for Engineering from Siemens for steady state and dynamic simulation of large power systems.
  • Software PowerFactory: comercial license of PowerFactory from Digsilent for steady state, dynamic and EMT simulation of large power systems.
  • Software PSCAD: comercial license of PSCAD from Manitoba Hydro International for EMT simulation of power systems.
  • Matlab-Simulink: Simulink® is a block diagram environment for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design.
  • ANSYS: a general-purpose software, used to simulate interactions of all disciplines of physics, structural, vibration, fluid dynamics, heat transfer and electromagnetic for engineers.
  • FAST: NREL's primary CAE tool for simulating the coupled dynamic response of wind turbines. FAST joins aerodynamics models, hydrodynamics models for offshore structures, control and electrical system (servo) dynamics models, and structural (elastic) dynamics models to enable coupled nonlinear aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation in the time domain.
  • RHINO
  • SIEMENS STAR-CCM+: Commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) FVM-based tool.
  • OPEN FOAM: Open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) FVM-based tool.
  • ORCAFLEX: package for the dynamic analysis of offshore marine systems. Performs global static and dynamic analysis of a wide range of offshore systems, typically including boundary conditions such as vessels, buoys, etc., as well as finite element.
  • FeniCS: FEniCS is a popular open-source (LGPLv3) computing platform for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). FEniCS enables users to quickly translate scientific models into efficient finite element code. With the high-level Python and C++ interfaces to FEniCS, it is easy to get started, but FEniCS offers also powerful capabilities for more experienced programmers. FEniCS runs on a multitude of platforms ranging from laptops to high-performance clusters.
  • BBIPED: BBIPED is an engineering simulation software for fluid dynamics industrial applications. BBIPED can handle a wide range of engineering applications in sectors such as turbomachinery, aeronautics, renewable energy, biosciences, advanced manufacturing, automotive, water and heat management; providing ad-hoc solutions for specific industry needs. The BBIPED Graphical User Interface allows an automated CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation process from CAD generation, meshing, solving and post-processing.
  • PSIM: NREL's primary CAE tool for simulating the coupled dynamic response of wind turbines. FAST joins aerodynamics models, hydrodynamics models for offshore structures, control and electrical system (servo) dynamics models, and structural (elastic) dynamics models to enable coupled nonlinear aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulation in the time domain.
  • ORCAD: Electronic design program.
  • Mentor Graphics: Electronic design program.
  • Max+Plus II, Quartus, ISE, EDK: PLC device programming software.
  • CAE Software: Matlab, Maple, Labview, ANSYS, GIM.

Corrosion

  • Harshlab: Component Corrosion Test Platform. FREE ACCESS THROUGH MARINET2 Project. video here

Actuation and manufacturing of prototypes

Prototypes manufacturing

  • 3D printers: 3D Stratasys Dimension sst 1200es and Markforged II.
  • Machine tools for the manufacturing of components.

Hardware, control and actuation equipment

  • Control and data acquisition equipment: 2 CRIO-9024 + 1 NI cDAQ-9188.
  • Actuation system Schneider: 4 motors (2.89 kW), controllers and power supply,
  • Actuation system Maxon: 6 DC motors (150 W), controllers and power supply.
  • Actuation system based on Arduinos.
  • PC panel B&R for the development of control algorithms and user’s interfaces.
  • Pneumatic system Festo: 1 pneumatic gripper + 1 pneumatic muscle. Schunk electric gripper.
  • Sensors: 10 position sensors, 6 uniaxial accelerometers, 2 triaxle accelerometers, 2 inclinometers, 4 flexion sensors y 4 Kistler 9347C dynamometric tables.
  • 20-chanels LMS SCADA mobile scm05.
  • Hexapod H-840 de Physik Instrumente.
  • Image monitoring and measuring system.