Gaining Insights from Optimising Wave Energy Converters

Abstract

Renewable energy, such as ocean wave energy, plays a pivotal role in addressing the tremendous growth of global energy demand. It is expected that wave energy will be one of the fastest-growing energy resources in the next decade, offering an enormous potential source of sustainable energy. In collaboration with Carnegie Clean Energy, our research investigates the placement and control optimisation of oscillating buoy-type wave energy converters. The ultimate goal is to decrease the levelised cost of energy. Optimising the buoy positions is a challenging research problem because of very complex interactions (constructive and destructive) between buoys. In this talk, I will outline how my team and I work with the company, and I will provide an overview on the technical aspects. In particular, and going from simplified wave scenarios to real ones, I will outline the challenges that we have had to overcome, and I will outline our process of extracting characteristics from the “black box”, which then informed the custom design of algorithms.

Project page: https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~optlog/research/energy.php

Markus Wagner (Bild: Markus Wagner)

CV

Dr. Markus Wagner is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide, Australia. He has done his PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany and at the University of Adelaide, Australia. As the first in computer science, he has been awarded the University of Adelaide Doctoral Research Medal. His research topics range from mathematical runtime analysis of heuristic optimization algorithms and theory-guided algorithm design to applications of heuristic methods to renewable energy production, professional team cycling and software engineering. So far, he has been a program committee member over 40 times, and he has written over 100 articles with over 100 different co-authors. He has chaired several education-related committees within the IEEE CIS, and he has been GECCO’s Workshop and Competition Chair in the past.

https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~markus/
https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=9cbh6PoAAAAJ&hl=en