Modeling and Control of Oscillating Water Column Devices for Ocean Energy Conversion.

Abstract

The work elaborated in this Ph. D. thesis focused on the modeling and control of an OWC device installed in the NEREIDA wave power plant of Mutriku. The main contributions are the development of a proper MATLAB/Simulink model of the OWC plant for control purposes and proposing and implementing different control strategies. The Wells turbine-based OWC system is known to generate a liimited power because of the undesired stalling behavior. Hence, the developed control strategies have to avoid this stalling behavior in order to improve the power generation of the system.Two control strategies have been proposed and investigated. The first control strategy if the airflow control, wich aims to regulate the airflow by means of the throttle valve. The second strategy is the rotational speed control wich aims to regulate the rotor speed by means of the Rotor Side Converster (RSC) of the back-to-back converter. Advanced soft computing and nonconventional techniques have been considered and showed satisfactory performances.