Ocean Power Technologies

The benefit of acausal control strategies for Wave Energy Convertors (WECs) is empirically demonstrated in a wave tank. An upstream wave gage is used to provide real time predictions of the wave elevation at the WEC’s location. Using a sub-optimal control strategy based upon complex conjugate control, these predictions are used to generate real time force commands for the Power Take Off (PTO) system. Empirical comparisons are made between the acausal control strategy and a simple linear damping approach. I