LEAP-HI: US-Ireland R&D Partnership: Control Co-Design for Ocean Wave Energy Conversion

The United Nations has designated the 2020s as the “Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development”. Along the long coastlines of the US, Ireland, and the UK, ocean waves represent a vast, untapped, high-density power source. It has been estimated that wave energy has the potential to supply at least one third of US electricity demand.

In spite of the huge potential of wave energy to provide power, wave energy conversion is still in its infancy worldwide with none of the wave energy converters (WEC) to date achieving widespread acceptance. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project will research the fundamental theory and design tools needed to design practical wave energy converter systems in an integrated fashion.

It will be completed through interdisciplinary collaboration of five investigators across three countries throughout the co-design process, from early concept design and components innovation to system integration and field validation. The success of the research on wave energy conversion will help mitigate the global energy crisis, combat climate change, relieve environmental concerns, accelerate blue economy development, and benefit society.

It will also serve as a demonstration to inspire worldwide collaborations to solve the global crisis of energy sustainability and establish US-European collaborative leadership in the emerging field of the blue economy.

For WECs to efficiently convert energy from wave to wire, multidisciplinary research is required, including a wave capture structure (WCS) to capture the oscillating irregular wave energy as mechanical energy, a power take-off (PTO) subsystem to convert mechanical energy into electricity, and advanced control to adapt the device to irregular wave excitations and optimize power capture. Each of these modules takes domain-specific expertise, which is conventionally addressed sequentially by domain experts.

Such a sequential design paradigm neglects the strong couplings among WCS hydrodynamics, PTO dynamics, and system control, which generally results in a sub-optimal or even infeasible design. This transdisciplinary research project aims to establish an integrated design paradigm by testing and validating a radically new control co-design approach to create mutually-efficient PTO and WCS, with active mechanical motion rectification (AMMR), nested co-optimization, and advanced control.

The program is a disruptive paradigm switch from the common sequential “design and then control” approach to a concurrent “design for control” and “control for design” approach to holistically design and optimize the entire WEC device’s geometry, system layout, PTO, and control system for significantly improved performance. This research will create fundamental knowledge and tools for coupled modelling, design and control of the WEC system to drive the convergence of wave energy conversion technologies.

The research will impact the quality and diversity of education at four universities through multidimensional technical and professional skill trainings, international internships, opportunities for underrepresented minorities and women, and unique hands-on experiences for K-12 and community college students.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.