Informatics Publishing Limited

D. Madan ¹, M. Rajendran ², A. Amarkarthik ³, M. Prabhakaran ⁴, Suresh Sagadevan ⁵

Affiliations
1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sree Sastha College of Engineering, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, IN
2 KGiSL Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, IN
3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Tamil Nadu, IN
4 Department of Mechanical Engineering, P.S.V College of Engineering and Technology, Tamil Nadu, IN
5 Department of Physics, AMET University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, IN

Abstract

The ocean is one of the biggest renewable energy resources. Energy harnessing from the ocean is an interesting area that is worth researching and full of promise for all energy engineers and researchers. There are a number of methods to follow in energy extraction from the ocean wave and tide. Point absorber is one of potent devices for energy extraction from the ocean wave. It could potentially afford a large amount of power in a relatively small device compared with the other technologies. It extracts the energy from the up-and-down movement of the buoy(s) on the ocean wave. To take full advantage of the device the point absorbers are designed to move freely along the wave. During rough weather condition, the wave exerts high buoyancy force on the buoy(s), forcing the device to face more stress and causing the device failure. To overcome this drawback, floating bodies in a point absorber were replaced by non-buoyant object in a certain research. That result showed that the ratio between the heave responses of the container and the corresponding wave amplitude (heave response ratio) of the device reached up to 2.6 so that the energy capture of this device was considerably raised per unit wave front. The results showed the energy production in the device being appreciably high at the range of 2.3-2.7s wave period and proportional to wave height under 30W and 60W electrical load condition. That experiment was conducted on a steel cylindrical container of diameter 0.4 m and height 0.7 m, used as non-buoyancy object. In this paper, a test was conducted to find the impact of the container geometry on the efficiency of non-buoyancy body type wave energy converter with existing result circumstance. The results obtained in the test on various shapes of the containers such as cylindrical, conical, inverted conical and double side conical, were plotted. The results showed that when using inverted conical shape of container, approximately 9% of output power could be increased compared with the using of existing cylindrical shape of container.

Keywords

Buoy(s), Cylindrical Shape, Energy Converter, Energy Harnessing

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