Electrical Power from seawave energy

Abstract

Current energy crisis and general concerns on environmental issues have triggered an ever increasing effort on harvesting renewable energies. Amongst renewable energy sources, sea wave energy is definitely the one that has been less utilised. This is probably caused by three reasons: i) the low energy concentration in the sea waves, at least in the sites where it is technically possible to install conversion stations: ii) the strong technical novelties that are required to extract the energy that is contained in a highly and stochastically variable motion; iii) the difficulty to find a suitable electrical system able to convert the energy contained in the motion of the sea into electrical energy. Several approaches to harvest sea wave energy have been proposed; almost all of them introduce a mechanical conversion device between the waves and the electromagnetic generator. This stage converts the mechanical energy contained in the waves into a more usable mechanical energy; it can be a hydraulic coupling device or a mechanical gear and, i n an y cas e, introduces additional l osses a nd a dditional maintenance r equirements. In order t o reduce t hese l osses a generator directly coupled to the sea waves should be used. This paper presents the optimization of a permanent magnet linear generator directly coupled to sea waves.