Model Predictive Control for an Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter

This thesis work aims to design a controller for the Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter (ISWEC) system based on the Model Predictive Control (MPC) technique with the goal of maximizing the produced electric power by converting the energy owned by the sea motions into electric energy. The energy conversion takes place through the Power Take-Off (PTO) unit, which is the object of the system to be controlled. The design stage of the controller aims to find a suitable tradeoff among different requirements such as energy production, command effort and PTO shaft speed limitation. Constraints of the ISWEC system such as the feasible bounds of the actuator are taken into account explicitly in the problem . A linear model of the ISWEC system is employed for implementing the MPC optimization problem as a quadratic programme (QP), to obtain a fast online implementation on the processor control unit present in the considered ISWEC system by means of an efficient solver. Numerical simulations of a detailed ISWEC nonlinear model have been performed to test the effectiveness of the designed controller. The obtained results are shown and discussed.