Development of a wireless control and monitoring system for wave energy converters

The Ocean, inherently unstable and uncertain, is one of the harshest environments to test engineering designs; and with the increasing interest in ocean renewable energies, methods and tools must be developed for faster, reliable, low cost, and effective evaluation of the ocean energy technologies. This paper proposes one such tool/system, a small-scale, portable, wireless and universal Power Control and Monitoring Unit (PCMU) for the design and performance evaluation of wave energy converters (WECs). A prototype PCMU system was successfully deployed on June 8th, 2012 with wave energy convertor systems developed at Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech).