The effect of wave period filtering on wave power extraction and device tuning

The variations in the quantity of wave power available to a wave energy converter by filtering out short-period waves have been examined in this paper. Ocean wave data recorded at three different locations and water depths around northern Europe are used for this purpose along with numerically synthesized wave time series. A wave power ratio, defined as the ratio between the wave power for the filtered and unfiltered data, is calculated for each data set, and the variation of this quantity with the degree of filtering is investigated. Two new parameters namely, R and S are defined to quantify the effect of this filtering on the variation of wave-to-wave period and height. It is shown that removing the shorter period waves has little effect upon the power available for extraction but may significantly reduce the rate at which the wave energy converter must retune to achieve optimum power conversion.