Development of a reduced order wave to wire model of an OWC wave energy converter for control system analysis

Abstract Wave energy converters (WECs) face difficulties such as low operating range, low power output and, fluctuating power. A seamless synchronization among WEC components is required to get a better performance. For control system studies, the model should capture all the necessary dynamics involved in each conversion stages, however the interlinked complexity in each subsystem increases the computation time. This article presents a reduced order wave-to-wire (WTW) model of an oscillating water column (OWC) based WEC. The approach involves modeling of hydrodynamic and aerodynamic coupling of the capture chamber, aerodynamic and thermodynamic coupling inside the capture chamber, aerodynamic and rotor dynamic coupling in air turbine; and rotor dynamics and generator dynamics in the turbine generator coupling. The result shows that the model retains its fundamental dynamics and reduces the number of unknowns to describe the state space. The model indicates the correlation of each variable represented in the state space. The model predicted power output for different sea state. It also shows that the accuracy and the efficiency of the model are acceptable for OWC-WEC control system studies. The present model can be used as a time domain tool to design an effective control system for OWC device for different sea states, and the overall device performance can be improved significantly.