Dynamic emulation of oscillating wave energy converter

This paper presents emulation of dynamic behavior of a wave energy converter in test bed condition. To evaluate performance of the electrical generator and associated power electronic converter in wave energy conversion (WEC) system, it is important to have the WEC device driving the generator. However, in test bed, the actual WEC device can not be installed. Rather, it is convenient to have an electrical motor working as the WEC device, driving the generator to be tested. Therefore, electrical motor needs to emulate the dynamic behavior of the WEC device closely to have the actual system conditions. In this paper, a point absorber buoy modeling is presented and emulation methods are described. The model is simulated in MATLAB-Simulink as well as real-time NI CompactRIO platform. The real time controller can generate the torque reference for an electrical motor to drive the generator. Thus NI CompactRIO emulates the behavior of the WEC system. All corresponding results are presented and discussed.