Practical performances of MPC for wave energy converters

Maximising the efficiency of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) is one of the important tasks toward the exploitation of the wave energy resource. Along with a proper design of the device, an important way to achieve better energy performances is to improve the wave-body interaction by applying an appropriate control strategy. Several control strategies have been proposed in literature. Among the others, the Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is the focus of this article, while the objective is to evaluate the performance of the MPC in a physical model of a WEC. The MPC was implemented in a scaled version (1:20) of a single floater of the Wavestar WEC: a single degree of freedom point absorber. The system was tested with regular and irregular long crested waves in the deep basing at Aalborg University, DK and results of the MPC are compared with standard resistive controller architecture, implemented as a linear damper.