ORCID
- Deborah Greaves: 0000-0003-3906-9630
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Phase-resolved wave prediction is of vital importance for the real-time control of wave energy converters. In this paper, a novel wave prediction method is proposed, which, to the authors’ knowledge, achieves the real-time nonlinear wave prediction with quantified uncertainty (including both aleatory and model uncertainties) for the first time. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the prediction of the predictable zone without assuming linear sea states, while all previous works on predictable zone determination were based on linear wave theory (which produces overly conservative estimations). The proposed method is developed based on the Bayesian machine learning approach, which can take advantage of machine learning model’s ability in tackling complex nonlinear problems, while taking various forms of uncertainties into account via the Bayesian framework. A set of wave tank experiments are carried out for evaluation of the method. The results show that the wave elevations at the location of interest are predicted accurately based on the measurements at sensor location, and the prediction uncertainty and its variations across the time horizon are well captured. The comparison with other wave prediction methods shows that the proposed method outperforms them in terms of both prediction accuracy and the length of the predictable zone. Particularly, for short-term wave forecasting, the prediction error by the proposed method is as much as 55.4% and 11.7% lower than the linear wave theory and deterministic machine learning approaches, and the predictable zone is expanded by the proposed method by as much as 74.6%.
DOI Link
Publication Date
2022-10-15
Publication Title
Applied Energy
Volume
324
ISSN
0306-2619
Acceptance Date
2022-07-17
Deposit Date
2022-07-27
Embargo Period
2022-07-29
Funding
This work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant number: EP/S000747/1). The authors also acknowledge the Scientific Computing Research Technology Platform (SCRTP) at the University of Warwick for providing High-Performance Computing resources.
Keywords
Bayesian neural network, Deterministic sea wave prediction, Predictable zone, Probabilistic machine learning, Uncertainty quantification, Wave tank experiment
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Zhang, J., Zhao, X., Jin, S., & Greaves, D. (2022) 'Phase-resolved real-time ocean wave prediction with quantified uncertainty based on variational Bayesian machine learning', Applied Energy, 324. Available at: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.119711
