Control and productivity analysis of the full scale ISWEC prototype

In the past four decades, hundreds of Wave Energy Converters (WECs) have been proposed and studied, but so far a final architecture to harvest wave power has not been identified. Many engineering problems are still to be solved, like survivability, durability and effective power capture in a variable wave climate. ISWEC (Inertial Sea Wave Energy Converter) is a system using the gyroscope to extract power. The goal of this paper is to identify an optimal control strategy in order to maximize wave power exploitation of ISWEC. Here we present a new adaptive control technique and the results deriving from its application to an ISWEC device with rated power of 60kW. ISEWC with the new control strategy are finally applied to the test case of Alghero, and the results in terms of power potential and yearly productivity are shown.