Abstract
The efficient extraction of energy from ocean waves remains an ongoing challenge despite the large amount of energy available. Many different designs of wave energy converters (WEC) have been proposed. Recently, there has been significant interest in WEC that uses flexure to convert energy starting with Renzi (2016). Recent work includes Zheng et al. (2021), Collins et al. (2021), Zheng et al. (2022). The key to modelling the absorption of energy from flexure is to include an imaginary part in the stiffness in the frequency domain formulation. This appears for piezoelectric wave energy converters, for example. We consider here a solution which is based on the modal expansion and the calculation of the added mass and damping. This method is more standard in ocean engineering and allows the application of well-known methods and computational techniques. We also derive from first principles an energy absorption equation.