Power Take Off Damping Optimisation With Regard to Wave Climate

Considered as a source of renewable energy, wave is a resource which exhibit high variability at all time scales. Furthermore wave climate also changes significatively from place to place. Wave energy converters are very often tuned to suit the more frequent significant wave period of the project site. In this paper we show that optimizing the device necessitates to account for all possible wave conditions weighted by their occurrence frequency, as generally given by the classical wave climate scatter diagrams. Instead of a real device, a generic and very simple wave energy converter was considered here. We show how the optimal parameters can be different considering whether all wave conditions are accounted for or not, whether the device is controlled or not, whether the vertical motion is limited or not. We also show how they depend on the area where the device is to be deployed, by applying the same method to three very different sites.