Research on Excitation Estimation for Ocean Wave Energy Generators Based on Extended Kalman Filtering

Abstract

Wave energy generation methods have significant energy costs. The implementation of sophisticated control techniques in wave energy generators can lower the cost of power generation by optimizing the energy recovered from wave energy converters (WECs). To determine control inputs, most control systems rely on knowledge of the wave excitation force, including information on past, present, and future excitation forces. For the excitation of WEC devices, wave excitation force can only be inferred and predicted because it is an unmeasurable quantity. One of the more widely used observers in wave excitation estimates at the moment is the Kalman filter, but its use is primarily restricted to linear Kalman filtering. The mooring system is an integral component of floating wave energy producers. The mooring force of the device is actually nonlinear; however, the majority of current studies on excitation estimates for wave energy producers based on Kalman filter methods employ an ideal motion model based on the linearization of the mooring force. This paper, in an attempt to make things more realistic, creates a WEC system with highly nonlinear mooring forces, suggests a way to build a wave excitation force estimator for a nonlinear WEC system using the extended Kalman filtering method, and assesses the impact of various factors, such as measurement noise, random phase, and the number of equal-energy methods dividing the frequency, on the accuracy of the wave excitation force estimate.