Modeling of hydrodynamics and mechanical aspects of a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) to understand the main principles

This work aims at illustrating a first-approach modeling of an all-purpose wave energy converter (WEC), and reproducing its allegedly behavior, once there is a need to forecast its production from a location, where all the monitoring data are available, to another location. A few commercial software provide such a feature but, to proficiently use them, several practical parameters are needed and this makes the learning quite hard. In the proposed model, some parameters are offered and can be tuned according with the device to reproduce, and its known data (e.g. power matrix). The Simulink/Matlab model needs the couple (H,T) (wave height and period) as input, and it provides mechanic, and then, electric power as output: using a time series of (H i ,T i ), it is able to produce a suitable power profile, useful to be used-for instance-in feasibility studies.