Offshore floating platform synergizing internally-installed self-reacting wave energy converters for optimizing vibration control and energy harvesting

Vibration control is essential for ensuring the safe operation of offshore floating platforms (OFPs). Although a basic combination of the OFP with wave energy converters (WECs) can realize vibration control and energy harvesting, there remains a challenge in achieving effective vibration control across a broad frequency band while facilitating efficient energy harvesting. To bridge this research gap, this paper extends the operation mechanism of internally installed WECs into the OFP vibration control scenario. This concept achieves physical isolation of the WECs from ocean waves, enabling WECs to directly absorb vibration energy from OFP and suppress its meanwhile. For illustration purposes, a semi-submersible floating platform (SSP) synergizing multiple internally-installed self-reacting WECs (SSP-SRWEC) is designed. A dynamic model is established and validated in both time and frequency domains. Based on this, dual-objective synergized optimization is conducted to determine the optimal parameters of SSP-SRWEC for both vibration control and energy harvesting purposes. Comparative analysis with a typical SSP combined with WEC demonstrates that the proposed SSPSRWEC has the following advantages: (i) significantly enhanced vibration control over a wider frequency range, and (ii) greater energy harvesting performance under the same device conditions.