Conventional hydropower technologies such as dams have been criticized due to their negative environmental effects which have necessitated the development of new technologies for sustainable development of hydropower energy. Hydrokinetic (HK) energy is one such emerging renewable energy technology and, in this study, a theoretical potential assessment was done using a Geographic Information System (GIS) and Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model, for the U-Tapao river basin (URB), a major tributary of the Songkhla lake basin (SLB) in southern Thailand. The SWAT was calibrated and validated with SWAT calibration and uncertainty (SWAT-CUP)-SUFI 2 programs using the observed discharge data from the gauging stations within the watershed. The model performance was evaluated based on the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and the coefficient of determination (R2) values, achieving 0.62 and 0.60, respectively, for calibration, and 0.65 and 0.68 for validation which is considered acceptable and can be used to represent flow estimation. The theoretical HK potential was estimated to be 71.9 MW along the 77.18 km U-Tapao river, which could be developed as a renewable and reliable energy source for the communities living around the river. The method developed could also be applied to river systems around the world for resource and time efficient HK potential assessments.
An approach for routine identification of swell and sea in nominally fully developed, omnidirectional, surface water wave energy spectra measured in arbitrary water depth is developed, applied, and discussed. The methodology is an extension of earlier work with deepwater spectra and involves identifying the frequency at which wave steepness is maximized and relating this to the swell separation frequency. The TMA parameterized spectrum is employed to establish a relationship between the two frequencies so that the methodology can be used when wind data are unavailable. The methodology is developed for finite water depth and tested using a dataset that includes both acoustic Doppler current profiler and wave buoy data, recorded simultaneously at the same location. For cases where the sea and swell are clearly, visually distinguishable in the omnidirectional spectra, the new method accurately distinguishes between the two, but it can also be used to identify sea and swell in unimodal spectra.
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