This project is currently ongoing, and final public reporting is due to be published in Winter 2022. 

For further information on the current status, please contact the Lead Applicant.  

The primary objective of the project is to contribute a technology that allows a significant reduction in the through life installed capacity cost of wave energy converters (WECs) applicable to a wide range of WEC hull and power take-off (PTO) designs.

To achieve this objective, we will experimentally validate in a hardware in the loop (HIL) environment, the efficacy of the control techniques successfully developed in Stage 1 and Stage 2. Further to this, we will validate the techniques by implementing them on a fully representative scaled WEC system, i.e. the existing 1/20th scale physical model attenuator type WEC developed by Mocean Energy Ltd. The control techniques developed in this project can be straightforwardly extended to other types of WECs.

In Stage 3, we will provide further evidence based on experimental results to validate the main numerical results of Stage 2, to confirm the benefits of our control techniques and quantitatively compare their performance with the existing baseline control techniques. We will deliver a design outline for broader WEC control systems to provide a generic guideline for WEC controller selection, design and tuning.