Much of the existing literature for wave energy converters focuses on devices tailored to grid-scale performance. In this paper, we present the development of TigerRAY, a small, blue-economy scale wave energy converter, designed to generate 100 W in fetch limited waves. This development process involved in-lab dynamometer testing, two years of drifting field tests, and a two month moored deployment on Lake Washington. Through this process, we show the impact of proper ballasting to TigerRAY’s performance, and highlight the importance of dynamometer testing to PTO development and characterization. We also show that power electronics are critical not only to the power output of the device, but to the device dynamics as well. We demonstrate the feasibility of a wave energy converter hosting a dock for an uncrewed underwater vehicle in the field, successfully docking the vehicle with the wave energy converter in all six demonstration attempts. Finally, we provide analysis of data from field testing. TigerRAY’s relationship between power output and significant wave height remains relatively constant through changing wave directions, float locations, and power electronics functionality.
Rusch et al. (Fri,) studied this question.