Semi-Active Control for Two-Body Ocean Wave Energy Converter by Using Hybrid Model Predictive Control

Model predictive control (MPC) has been considered as one important feed-forward optimal control strategy for ocean wave energy converter (WEC) targeted on power maximization. The capability of MPC to handle system constraints (ex. stroke, velocity, actuator limitations), and the availability to provide optimal solution for linear system provide potential for the implementation of such algorithm in the WEC control. However, currently, only active MPC control has been introduced for single and two-body WECs. Such control strategy may introduce negative power during the optimization process, since the power take-off (PTO) damping has no constraint. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid MPC strategy in limiting both the PTO damping force and PTO damping to avoid negative power generation during cost function minimization (negative power minimization) for the two-body WEC. The problem is formulated into a quadratic programming (QP) problem targeted at power maximization. However, the standard QP problem formulation cannot be directly applied to the semi-active control problem due to the PTO damping constraints. Therefore, the problem is reformulated as a Mixed-integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) problem, which contains logical switch to select constraint matrices based on the sign of the relative velocity between the buoy and submerged body. The optimal solution is compared with those of the active MPC control strategy and the passive model with the same irregular wave input.