Development of Control Strategies for Interconnected Pneumatic Wave Energy Converters

In the field of wave energy converter control, high fidelity numerical models have become the predominant tool for the development of accurate and comprehensive control strategies. In this study, a numerical model of a novel wave energy converter, employing a pneumatic power take-off, is created to provide a low-cost method for the development of a power-maximizing control strategy. Device components and associated architectures are developed in the time domain solvers Proteus DS and MATLAB/Simulink. These two codes are dynamically coupled at run time to produce a complete six degree of freedom, time domain simulation of the converter. Utilizing this numerical framework, a genetic algorithm optimization procedure is implemented to optimally select eight independent parameters governing the PTO geometry. Optimality is measured in terms of estimated annual energy production at a specific deployment location off the West Coast of Canada. The optimization exercise is one layer of PTO force control — the parameters selected are seen to provide significant improvements in the annual power output, while also smoothing the WEC power output on both a sea-state by sea-state and wave-by-wave basis.