Optimal Damping Profile for a Heaving Buoy Wave Energy Converter

This paper discusses optimal damping profiles for a heaving buoy Wave Energy Converter (WEC) with a single degree of freedom. The goal is to examine how the device can be controlled to harvest maximum energy from incident waves. Both latching and declutching strategies are allowed via a general parametrization of the damping force. Ultimately, the research attempts to determine the best control strategy to apply considering the relative resonant frequency of the device and the monochromatic wave frequency set.