1Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, TamilNadu, India
2Professor, Department of Ocean Engineering, IITM, Chennai
3Professor and Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, TamilNadu, India
Online published on 4 July, 2016.
A novel method of improving hydrodynamic efficiency by using a cylindrical non-buoyant body instead of floating body in point absorber type wave energy conversion is studied. The proposed novel method has the potential to significantly improve the energy conversion rate and reliability when compared to other recently proposed devices. To illustrate the improved performance and reliability of the proposed device, a simple two degree of freedom system was constructed and experimented at a wave tank. Heave response of the non-buoyant body was measured by placing an accelerometer for various wave and device parameters. The instantaneous excited force on non-buoyant body was obtained by calculating net angular momentum from measured instantaneous heave acceleration and system mass. The resulting force conversion shows that the force excited on the body is significantly higher than the force excited by the wave. It was proved from the experiment that this improved force conversion is the result of novel working principle of the device. It is also objective to show that the device use no complicated mechanisms like latching control, damping control, change of float forms or moving parts like flaps to improve the heave response.
Ocean Energy, Point Absorber, Green Energy, Non-Buoyant Body, WEC in Heave
