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Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Campus Access Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (MS)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics

Advisor 1

Ossama Abdelkhalik

Committee Member 1

Wayne W. Weaver

Committee Member 2

Lucia Gauchia

Abstract

Wave energy has the potential to meet a significant part of our energy needs. Significant improvements have been made in the wave energy conversion technology in the past few decades. Optimal control of wave energy converters has been studied extensively in recent years and one of the recently developed techniques presented here is the Bang-Singular-Bang control. This thesis aims to investigate the application of a linear Kalman filter state estimation technique to estimate the excitation force needed to implement the Bang Singular Bang Control. The linear estimation model for amplitudes and phases of the harmonic components assume their frequencies to be known quantities over the entire range. It is shown that the selection of these frequencies is significant and when these frequencies (initially uniformly distributed) are placed in the high-energy region, the energy harvested is close to the theoretical maximum. Extensive numerical simulations for different irregular sea states are conducted in this study. The energy obtained through this method is shown to be close to optimal level with certain limitations. A discussion on these limitations is presented in this thesis.

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