There are more than thousands of concepts for harvesting wave energy, and wave energy converters (WECs) are diverse in operating principles, design geometries and deployment manners, leading to misconvergence in WEC technologies. Among numerous WEC devices, the point absorber wave energy converter (PAWEC) concept is one of the simplest, most broad-based and most promising concepts that has been investigated intensively all over the world. However, there are only a few reviews focusing on PAWECs, and the dynamical advancement of PAWECs merits an up-to-date review. This review aims to provide a critical overview of the state of the art in PAWEC development, comparing and contrasting various PAWEC devices and discussing recent research and development efforts and perspectives of PAWECs in terms of prototyping, hydrodynamic modelling, power take-off mechanism and control.

This paper develops a wave-to-wire model of a vibro-impact wave energy converter array for stand-alone offshore applications. Nonlinear model predictive control is proposed for maximising the wave power capture of the array, and implemented by AC/DC converters and the space vector pulse width modulation technique. A hybrid energy storage system, consisting of batteries and supercapacitors, is placed parallel to the DC bus via buck-boost DC/DC converters to smooth the array power output, and a Lyapunov-based power management strategy is utilised to control the DC/DC converters for stabilising the DC bus voltage. Intensive numerical simulations are conducted; the results show that the proposed wave-to-wire model is capable to evaluate the performance of the vibro-impact wave energy converter array in various scenarios, and the proposed energy maximisation control and power management strategy can enhance wave power capture and stabilise the power output simultaneously.