This work – in which three peer-reviewed academic papers are presented – addresses the ap-plication of Bayesian Reinforcement Learning to the control of a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems. The first paper presents a comparison of a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) based wave energy converter controller against standard Reactive Damping...
Multiple wave energy converter (WEC) archetypes exist with varying power take-off (PTO) designs in the attempt to maximize ocean energy harnessed and converted into useful energy. The pendulum PTO is popular for its simple, yet robust functionality due to its internally located components and simple operation. Additionally, this PTO does...
This design of a Grid Friendly Electric Hot Water Heater Thermostat was built for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Design course, ECE44x. The design enables hot water heaters to respond to imbalances in the grid seen through deviations from standard grid frequency by varying the power output to the...
This work addresses the application of Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) to a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems in which the cost functional is not in a standard quadratic form, and the WEC model includes the nonlinear effects, such as the hydrodynamic viscous drag. The NMPC implementation is...
The performance of the power take-off (PTO) system for a wave energy converter (WEC) depends largely on its control algorithm. This paper presents an adaptive damping control algorithm that improves power capture across a range of sea states. Validation for the numerical model was performed using data from two sources;...
Ocean waves provide a promising source of renewable energy for the North American electric grid. However, ideal control of wave energy converters (WECs) requires perfect forecasting of future wave conditions, and waves can be unpredictable. This paper presents a comparison of three different prediction methods and analyzes their performance in...
When the term renewable energy is mentioned in a conversation, wind, solar, and hydro energy typically come to mind. However, there is one major resource that has remained mostly untapped: wave energy. Wind and solar power technologies are well established around the world but they cannot generate electricity all the...
Ocean wave energy converter technology continues to advance and new developers continue to emerge, leading to the need for a general design, modeling, and testing methodology. This work presents a development of the process of taking a wave energy converter from a concept to the prototype stage. A two body...
Recently, there has been peaked interest in developing high energy producing and optimized power take-off topologies for Wave Energy Converters (WEC). As large as the potential of the oceans may seem, harnessing that energy and effectively converting it to electricity in significant amounts is a challenge. Currently, there are no...
The objective of the work presented herein is the development of the extended Kalman filter for nonlinear system modeling. A standard Kalman filter is a well-known filter for estimating the state of a system, assuming the system is linear and it has a Gaussian distribution in its noise. In reality,...