2024/05/24 by Saeed Azad, Suraj Khanal, Azad, Saeed +5
Engineering · #Earthquake and Tsunami Effects #FOS: Electrical engineering #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.15717
openalex publication_date 2024/05/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A promising direction towards reducing the levelized cost of energy for wave energy converter (WEC) farms is to improve their performance. WEC design studies generally focus on a single design domain (e.g., geometry, control, or layout) to improve the farm's performance under simplifying assumptions, such as regular waves. This strategy, however, has resulted in design recommendations that are impractical or limited in scope because WEC farms are complex systems that exhibit strong coupling among geometry, control, and layout domains. In addition, the location of the candidate site, which has a large impact on the performance of the farm, is often overlooked. Motivated by some of the limitations observed in WEC literature, this study uses an integrated design framework, based on simultaneous control co-design (CCD) principles, to discuss the impact of site selection and wave type on WEC farm design. Interactions among plant, control, and layout are also investigated and discussed using a wide range of simulations and optimization studies. All of the studies were conducted using frequency-domain heaving cylinder WEC devices within a farm with a linear reactive controller in the presence of irregular probabilistic waves. The results provide high-level guidelines to help the WEC design community move toward an integrated design perspective.