Abstract
Ocean wave energy converter technology continues to advance and new developers continue to emerge, leading to the need for a general design, modeling, and testing methodology. This work presents a development of the process of taking a wave energy converter from a concept to the prototype stage. A two body heaving point absorber representing a generic popular design was chosen and a general procedure is presented showing the process to model a wave energy converter in the frequency and time domains. A scaled prototype of an autonomous small scale wave energy converter was designed, built, and tested and provided data for model validation. The result is a guide that new developers can adapt to their particular design and wave conditions, which will provide a path toward a cost of energy estimate. This will serve the industry by providing sound methodology to accelerate the continued development of wave energy converters.