Editor’s note: For easy download the posted pdf of the State of the Climate for 2019 is a low-resolution file. A high-resolution copy of the report is available by clicking here. Please be patient as it may take a few minutes for the high-resolution file to download.

This paper investigates model predictive control (MPC) of a single sea wave energy converter(WEC). By using control schemes which constrain certain quantities, such as the maximum size of the feedback force, the energy storage for actuators and relative heave motion, it is possible for control to not only improve performance but to directly impact strongly on design and cost. Motivated by this fact, a novel objective function is adopted in the MPC design, which brings obvious benefits: First, the quadratic program (QP) derived from this objective function can be easily convexified, which facilitates the employment of existing efficient optimization algorithms. Second, this novel design can trade off the energy extraction, the energy consumed by the actuator and safe operation. Moreover, an alternative QP is also formulated with the input slew rate as optimization variable, so that the slew rate limit of an actuator can be explicitly incorporated into optimization. All these benefits promote the real-time application of MPC on a WEC and reduced cost of hardware.

Editor’s note: For easy download the posted pdf of the State of the Climate for 2017 is a low-resolution file. A high-resolution copy of the report is available by clicking here. Please be patient as it may take a few minutes for the high-resolution file to download.

Editors note: For easy download the posted pdf of the State of the Climate for 2014 is a very low-resolution file. A high-resolution copy of the report is available by clicking here. Please be patient as it may take a few minutes for the high-resolution file to download.

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