Date of Award

Spring 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2024

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Pete Woytowitz

Abstract

The following thesis showcases the yearlong culmination of a senior design project focused on the development of a small-scale wave energy generator intended to provide consistent and sustainable energy for remote marine environments. This project’s main customers include, but are not limited to, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, and scuba diving sites worldwide. Based on these identified customers and their needs, a target power output of 50 watts was determined. Beyond this power requirement, the generator is required to resist corrosion, withstand rough marine conditions, and be modular as well as requiring low maintenance. All of these requirements allow for an improved alternative to the current choice of solar panels.

The scope of this project focused on supporting remote research and maritime companies with a more reliable power source than solar and fossil fuel systems. The currently employed solar panels suffer from long downtimes and high maintenance costs. This project serves as a better alternative. The general life cycle of the generator is as follows: deployment, standby, operation, maintenance, and retrieval. At the end of the life cycle, the generator will be recycled.

This senior project aims to deliver a simplistic, low-maintenance, and modular wave energy solution to provide a reliable power source for remote maritime research. Our project was able to theoretically produce a peak energy of 100 Watts via manual testing and modeling but was so far only able to produce 4 Watts in real testing due to constraints of our testing pool and wave size. Arguably, in phase II testing, with the removal of the inefficiencies seen in phase I, we believe that our output will be significantly higher and ideally close to our theoretical outputs. We were able to meet all other requirements outlined by our customers, such as size, cost competitiveness, and continuous uptime.

Download

Share

COinS