  A promising direction towards reducing the levelized cost of energy for wave
energy converter (WEC) farms is to improve their performance. WEC design
studies generally focus on a single design domain (e.g., geometry, control, or
layout) to improve the farm's performance under simplifying assumptions, such
as regular waves. This strategy, however, has resulted in design
recommendations that are impractical or limited in scope because WEC farms are
complex systems that exhibit strong coupling among geometry, control, and
layout domains. In addition, the location of the candidate site, which has a
large impact on the performance of the farm, is often overlooked. Motivated by
some of the limitations observed in WEC literature, this study uses an
integrated design framework, based on simultaneous control co-design (CCD)
principles, to discuss the impact of site selection and wave type on WEC farm
design. Interactions among plant, control, and layout are also investigated and
discussed using a wide range of simulations and optimization studies. All of
the studies were conducted using frequency-domain heaving cylinder WEC devices
within a farm with a linear reactive controller in the presence of irregular
probabilistic waves. The results provide high-level guidelines to help the WEC
design community move toward an integrated design perspective.
