Waves seem to speak to something deep in our souls. For some of us, they are best enjoyed from a distance, as if they somehow connected us with dreams and places far away. Some of us draw strength and recreation from an actual “discourse” with them, surrounded by them, riding over them, or sailing through them. They are among nature's most beautiful gifts, capable of both delighting and destroying us. Trying to utilize waves to provide energy for earthly uses might almost seem like attempting to teach some stately wild beast to perform silly tricks. Yet that is precisely what this book is about. That is precisely what some of the most brilliant and imaginative minds in engineering and mathematics have been working on the last four decades and, in some cases, longer. This book is about the work of giants who were building the engineering and mathematical foundations of wave energy converters (WECs) long before the authors could even have begun to understand their work. Some of this work has a beauty all its own, hard to find elsewhere.

This is an ambitious book. It attempts to merge the exciting but refined worlds of hydrodynamics, rigid-body dynamics, vibrations, and control systems with the complex and ambiguous world of design. Volumes enough to fill entire libraries have been written about these disciplines. So what makes this book worth picking up and opening? If you are interested in using waves as an energy source but find the literature daunting in its quality and quantity, this book will give you the tools to work your way through more complex material. If you want to be efficient with the technology you develop and if you are, like the rest of us, operating on a limited budget, this book will first introduce you to techniques that may lead to a better return on investment, and then illustrate some of these techniques through more detailed case-study applications. We speak, of course, of the natural marriage between wave energy and control engineering. To the wave energy engineer, controls provide a way to perform efficiently in ever-changing wave fields, and to do so with smaller structures.