Study of the smoothing effect on the power production in an array of SEAREV wave energy converters.

This paper deals with the smoothing effect on power production in an array of SEAREV wave energy converters (WEC) due to the summation of each single converter's production. A numerical model of the SEAREV WEC developed in previous works is used in this study to perform numerical simulations of motions of each WEC in the array in order to compute the full energy production. Comparisons are made between the electricity produced by each single device and the array. It shows the benefit of this smoothing effect on the global energy production. In monodirectionnal random waves, results show only a few devices are needed in order to reduce strongly the standard deviation of the instantaneous power with the mean power. Several device layouts are also considered, for different sets of random directional waves. It is shown that the smoothing effect does not depend on the sea state conditions nor oil the layout of the array but only on the number of systems in the array.