SWELL Project: Making wave energy competitive

DAUIN has established itself as a center of excellence in international research thanks to the awarding of the prestigious "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships" under the European Union's Horizon Europe program (HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF call), to the SWELL project coordinated by young researcher Simone Pirrera, under the supervision of Professor Diego Regruto Tomalino.
The funding is reserved for projects led by young researchers, supporting their careers, promoting international mobility, and the acquisition of new skills. This represents a unique opportunity to engage with research in an international context.
The program includes a two-year research fellowship at the University of Western Australia (UWA), within the Oceans Institute, under the supervision of Professor Hugh Wolgamot, and a secondment at Imperial College London (ICL), under the supervision of Professor David Angeli.

The SWELL project (Smart Wave Energy Conversion via Learning and Low-Cost Control) aims to pioneer the next generation of smart control technology for wave energy converters (WECs), addressing the urgent challenge of reducing their levelized cost of energy to attract investments in this promising renewable energy technology. Despite recent progress in WEC control, improvements in wave energy conversion remain limited due to difficulties in handling accurate nonlinear models in controller design. To overcome this, SWELL will develop the first data-driven model predictive controller (MPC) tailored to WECs, combining cutting-edge control methods, hydrodynamics, and machine learning. SWELL will deliver accurate, validated models that capture the ubiquitous nonlinear effects of WECs and exploit them in the design of an MPC that optimizes energy conversion. By integrating expertise from three world-class hosts, the unique nature of SWELL will enable efficient, fast, and practical control implementation with real-time capabilities and a low-cost design, supporting the pathway towards the effective commercialization of wave energy. This project comprises four scientific work packages, which accomplish: (i) accurate nonlinear hydrodynamic modeling of wave energy converters, (ii) efficient MPC design exploiting the explicit MPC paradigm enabled by convex relaxation techniques, (iii) experimental validation of the developed models and control, through the definition of a custom analog electronic circuit efficiently implementing the designed MPC, and (iv) release of open-source software implementing the developed methods.