Hardware-In-the-Loop simulation of a small scale prototype of a Wave Energy Converter

Sammanfattning: Renewable energy sources are a hot topic, both when it comes to climate change and the constant increase in demand of electricity due to population growth and a more electrified society. One such energy source is wave energy - an energy source with great potential but still relatively new with the need for further development. Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) together with Ocean Harvesting Technologies (OHT) have made a collaboration to build a scaled Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) system of a power take-off (PTO) based on OHTs wave energy converter, InfinityWEC. The purpose is to teach the students at BTH about hydrodynamic and HIL simulations. A manual will also be written to help students perform the lab activities. A model of the HIL system will first be implemented in Matlab/Simulink, both with and without the WEC-Sim hydrodynamic simulation toolbox and simulations will be run to predict the system's behaviour. To parametrize the hydrodynamic model, the open-source Boundary Element Method (BEM) code, NEMOH, is used. The HIL system consists of electric motors, connected mechanically to each other with a coupling. One of the motors is the actuator, which applies torque to the second motor according to the simulated hydrodynamic loads on the buoy. The second motor on the other hand applies a torque according to the load connected to it or torque-controlled according to a selected control strategy. In this thesis two different types of loading is used: 1) resistive load without control of the generator drive, 2) resistive and capacitive load with reactive control of the generator drive. The load resistance can be changed within a limited range as well as the sea state. Data that can be collected are the position and angular velocity of the motors, the currents to and from the two motors and the voltage over the load capacitance. The project concluded that the compensation needed for the motors to get the true hydrodynamic force has little effect when using reactive control and that a protective capacitor is be needed between the actuator motor and the power supply to protect it from reverse current. Finally, this work demonstrated the effectiveness of HIL systems to execute simulations to test and validate PTO systems in wave energy converters. The advantages are that one can create representative wave loading without the presence of water and with ease test different sea states.