WEC-Sim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator)

WEC-Sim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator) is an open-source software for simulating wave energy converters. The software is developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK using the multi-body dynamics solver Simscape Multibody. WEC-Sim has the ability to model devices that are comprised of bodies, joints, power take-off systems, and mooring systems. WEC-Sim can model both rigid bodies and flexible bodies with generalized body modes. Simulations are performed in the time-domain by solving the governing wave energy converter equations of motion in the 6 Cartesian degrees-of-freedom, plus any number of user-defined modes. The WEC-Sim Applications repository contains a wide variety of scenarios that WEC-Sim can be used to model, including desalination, mooring dynamics, nonlinear hydrodynamic bodies, passive yawing, batch simulations and many others. The software is very flexible and can be adapted to many scenarios within the wave energy industry.

WEC-Sim Developers

WEC-Sim is a collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office. Due to the open source nature of the software, WEC-Sim has also had many external contributions. For more information refer to Acknowledgements.

Current members of the development team include:

• Dominic Forbush (Sandia)

• Jeff Grasberger (Sandia)

• Salman Husain (NREL)

• Adam Keester (Sandia)

• Jorge Leon (Sandia)

• David Ogden (NREL)

• Kelley Ruehl (Sandia - PI)

• Nathan Tom (NREL - PI)

Former members of the development team include:

• Michael Lawson (NREL)

• Carlos Michelen (Sandia)

• Jennifer Van Rij (NREL)

• Yi-Hsiang Yu (NREL)