Robust and low computational cost controller for improving captured power in heaving wave energy converters

• Control of WEC.
• Robust control.
• Sliding mode control.
• Hierarchical control.

This study suggests a simple and robust control strategy for improving captured power in heaving wave energy converters (WEC). The controller aims at optimizing the captured power using a hierarchical control strategy (HCS), which consists of a higher and lower control levels. The top level control is responsible of producing the reference velocity that is used by the lower level controller to regulate the actual velocity of the WEC buoy. The reference is generated by solving an offline optimization problem for maximizing the absorbed energy subject to the buoy motion constraints. As an attempt to avoid computational complexity in real-time operation, a simple look-up table is produced for various sea-states conditions. In order to track this reference, sliding mode controller (SMC) is deployed. The design parameters of the SMC is tuned offline using a well-known model of WEC. Any perturbations, nonlinearities, and disturbances not covered by the used model will be handled by the robustness property of the SMC. Moreover, the used SMC does not add any further complexity to the overall control strategy. The proposed method is validated in both regular and irregular sea-states, as well as in both nominal and perturbed scenarios. Other control strategies were also used to further assess the performance of the proposed control strategy. Based on the simulation results, the proposed hierarchical controller outperformed the other controllers in both nominal and perturbed scenarios.