A Holistic Approach to Designing Damping Control Strategies for Heaving Wave Energy Converters

Compared to reactive control strategies, damping strategies generally have lower energy throughput, but it can prove to be effective for small WEC systems. To the best of our knowledge, damping strategies have been generally discussed either in the mechanical or the electrical contexts. Therefore, this work is an attempt to link between the two directly coupled sides of the problem. In this work, the effect of the wave environment characteristics and the operating conditions of the PTO system on the WEC power capturing performance is examined. A criterion to adequately select the required damping taking into account not only the hydrodynamic forces but also the design limitations present in the PTO system is derived. Both simulation and experimental results of the investigated system are presented and discussed.