In this study, an oscillating body WEC with a variable tuned inertial massmechanism is proposed to enhance the power generation performance.The tuned inertial mass mechanism has been recently introduced for civilstructures subjected to external loadings such as earthquake and wind toincrease energy absorption capability and to decay vibration rapidly. Asan alternate source of vibrations, the application of this idea to WECscan be expected to have a significant effect. However in real sea state,the resonant frequency of the mechanism needs to be adjusted corre-sponding to the change of the wave frequency to achieve high energyabsorbing performance. Thus, a small-scale prototype of the proposeddevice is designed and wave flume tests are carried out with input ofdifferent frequency regular waves. The results show that the properlydesigned WEC with the proposed mechanism demonstrates better powergeneration performance compared to the WEC without the mechanismover a wide range of wave frequencies.
展开▼
