Vaibhav Raghavan

Vaibhav Raghavan joined as a PhD researcher in the Offshore Engineering section of Hydraulic Engineering in January, 2022. He obtained his B-Tech in Civil Engineering from Amrita university, Coimbatore, India and went on to do his MSc at TU Delft in Structural Engineering specializing in Structural Mechanics. For his MSc thesis, he worked on "Hybrid method for Dynamic Soil-Structure Interaction of Offshore Wind Turbine Monopile foundations". Following his graduation in September 2017, he worked at Royal HaskoningDHV for 4 years as a Structural Engineering focusing on Earthquake and Blast analysis of masonry, concrete and steel structures through numerical simulations, as well as build software tools to speed up and automate work across the company.  

Research

Variable Wave Energy Converter Farms

Ocean wave energy has immense potential and can provide twice as much electricity as globally produced now due to its high energy density. Apart from the vastness of the resource, waves are more predictable and available throughout the year when compared to other forms of renewable energies. This makes the development and utilization of wave energy technologies immensely important to meet the renewable energy targets. For wave energy to become a commercially viable power source, individual wave energy converters (WECs) need to be deployed in large numbers (wave farms) similar to what can be seen in the wind industry. Although there is extensive research for wave farms with identical WECs, there is very limited research on mixed wave farms where different types of WECs are utilized in the same farm. To efficiently utilize the resource while ensuring survivability and reliability at viable costs, it is essential to understand the wave-structure interaction within these farms, also known as array effects, which is the focus of this research.

The proposed research will investigate ways to optimally deploy mixed wave farms considering power production, reliability, survivability, and wave wake effects from the structures.