CONFIRMATION OF A NONLINEAR MODEL PREDICTIVE CONTROL STRATEGY APPLIED TO A PERMANENT MAGNET LINEAR GENERATOR FOR WAVE-ENERGY CONVERSION

This paper begins with a brief review of the time-domain equation of motion for a generic oating body. The equation of motion of the oating body was modied to account for the inu-ence of a power-take-off unit (PTO) to predict the hydrodynamic and electromechanical performance of the coupled system. As the damping coefcient is considered the dominant contribution to the PTO reaction force, the optimum non time-varying damp-ing values were rst presented for all frequencies, recovering the well-known impedance-matching principle at the coupled reso-nance frequency. In an effort to further maximize power absorp-tion in both regular and irregular wave environments, nonlin-ear model predictive control (NMPC) was applied to the model-scale point absorber developed at UC Berkeley. The proposed NMPC strategy requires a PTO unit that could be turned o