Model Predictive Control of a Nonlinear 2-Body Point Absorber Wave Energy Converter With Estimated State Feedback

Ocean wave energy has the potential to significantly contribute to sustainable power generation in coastal regions. Much of the research effort has gone into developing time domain state space models of point absorber wave energy converters (WECs) and subsequently into model-based optimal control to efficiently harvest the maximum possible amount of energy. The resulting controllers require knowledge of the states of the WEC in order to achieve the design goals. The purpose of this paper is to design and apply an extended Kalman filter-based estimation algorithm to a nonlinear two-body WEC model and to evaluate its performance in conjunction with a model predictive controller (MPC), which maximizes energy yield while satisfying operational constraints.