Deep Ocean Energy Harvesting

Ocean energy is a renewable resource that has yet to be fully utilized. Waves are a consistently available resource, in spite of weather changes or time of day. Wave energy has the potential to supply power for a variety of applications ranging from supplying the grid to remote applications such as marine research and ocean reconnaissance. The goal of this project was to use a point absorber style wave energy converter to harvest the kinetic energy of waves. We designed and built a 1:15 scale model to test the mooring capabilities and power output. In order to calculate the power output, we measured the pressure output and stroke length, which could then be scaled to estimate a full-size wave energy converter