An application of model predictive control logic to inertial sea wave energy converter

Abstract

During the last years, considerable progress has been reached in energy research field focused on the renewable energy extraction technologies. In particular wave energy is one of the most important branches. Among the possibility, the Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter (ISWEC) is one of the most promising technology. This work was divided in two parts: firstly, the ISWEC model was created in order to predict the behavior of the system with accuracy to assure the correct functionality of the plant; then ISWEC model was applied to develop the Model Predictive control algorithm (MPC). All the work was developed for a three degrees of freedom system, considering the correlation between the horizontal movement, the vertical movement and the rotation, called surge, heave and pitch respectively. This correlation was important to improve the power extraction. The aim of this work is to design a controller that allow the automatic set the control value with the aim to extract the maximum power without an external prediction of the wave forces and regarding the input constraints due to components mechanical limits.