Integrated Design for Wave Energy Converter Farms: Assessing Plant, Control, Layout, and Site Selection Coupling in the Presence of Irregular Waves

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated design framework for wave energy converter farms that considers the complex interactions among plant, control, layout, and site selection under irregular wave conditions, aiming to reduce energy costs.

Contribution

It introduces a simultaneous control co-design approach that accounts for site and wave type impacts, addressing limitations of previous single-domain studies.

Findings

Site selection significantly influences farm performance.

Interactions among design domains are complex and critical.

Guidelines for integrated WEC farm design are proposed.

Abstract

A promising direction towards reducing the levelized cost of energy for wave energy converter (WEC) farms is to improve their performance. WEC design studies generally focus on a single design domain (e.g., geometry, control, or layout) to improve the farm's performance under simplifying assumptions, such as regular waves. This strategy, however, has resulted in design recommendations that are impractical or limited in scope because WEC farms are complex systems that exhibit strong coupling among geometry, control, and layout domains. In addition, the location of the candidate site, which has a large impact on the performance of the farm, is often overlooked. Motivated by some of the limitations observed in WEC literature, this study uses an integrated design framework, based on simultaneous control co-design (CCD) principles, to discuss the impact of site selection and wave type on WEC farm design. Interactions among plant, control, and layout are also investigated and discussed using a wide range of simulations and optimization studies. All of the studies were conducted using frequency-domain heaving cylinder WEC devices within a farm with a linear reactive controller in the presence of irregular probabilistic waves. The results provide high-level guidelines to help the WEC design community move toward an integrated design perspective.