Nonlinear Modelling of Power Take Off Systems

The motion of a simple inertial wave energy converter (WEC) is studied to find the relative motion between an internal mass and an external body. The power take off (PTO) system is deemed to connect the internal mass to the external body, modelled as a spring and damper in parallel. This PTO system is assumed to have both linear and nonlinear components, since this will result in a more accurate model. The nonlinearity of this model is a different approach to most other similar models. The known motion of the device allows an optimisation on the values of the spring and damper constants to be performed to maximise the power obtained from the device, for known wave and device properties.