Development of a state space model for wave energy conversion systems

A fast and accurate state space model of a multiple body wave energy converter (WEC) is developed in this paper. The purpose of this model is to expedite the development of the advanced controls critical to improving WEC performance. Although it possible to directly couple controller code with some - but not all - high resolution time domain simulation tools (WaveDyn, WEC-Sim, etc.), it can be much more time efficient to first develop the controller in an engineering suite (e.g., MATLAB/Simulink) with a simplified plant model to represent the WEC and provide closed loop feedback. The state space plant model developed in this paper can represent a multi-component WEC or an array of WECs and is demonstrated to be very accurate when compared to WaveDyn in a realistic irregular sea.