A New Sight to Optimize the Layout of Wave Energy Converters

Renewable energies are playing an increasingly important role in sustainable advancement. Wave energy has received a lot of attentions from researchers in recent years owing to its enormous potential and its minimal impact on aquatic organisms. The previous research has found that there are many factors that influence the generation of wave energy converters (WECs), such as PTO, layout, wave conditions etc. However, the energy output of WECs still is limited in large wave farm, due to the limitation of positions of an array of fully submerged three- tether buoy. In this study, we propose an improved algorithm based on multilayer information transfer for optimizing the farm layout of the wave energy converters and compare it with state-of- the-art methods applied to the WEC problem. Experiments are designed for the oscillating buoy-type wave energy converters in four real-wave scenarios (Perth, Adelaide, Tasmania, and Sydeny), using the numerical model to calculate the energy output of wave energy converters. The experimental results show that our improved strategy is highly competitive.