Design and performance tests of a snake-like wave energy converter

Abstract

Research on renewable energy have become a focus in recent years. Ocean wave energy is a kind of renewable energy that exists widely in the world. This paper presents a snake-like ocean Wave Energy Converter (WEC) , which is more adaptive to the wave shape than some other WECs. In order to improve energy conversion efficiency, we designed and tested three types of magnetoelectric transducers for snake-like WEC, namely, axial magnetization transducer, radial magnetization transducer and Halbach permanent magnet array transducer. In order to enhance the power density of the WECs, a lumped parameter equivalent magnetic circuit model is proposed to optimize its magnetic structural parameter. Then the finite element analysis method is used to analyze models and verify theoretical results. Three 1:5 prototypes of the magnetoelectric transducers are fabricated for experimental verification. The experiments indicate that the prototype with the Halbach permanent magnets array transducer has an output power of 693.80 mW when WEC moves at a relative velocity of 0.1 m/s, the V _RMS value of induced voltage is 6.69 V. and this prototype has the highest volumetric Figure of Merit (FoM _v ) of 1.67%. In conclusion, the Halbach permanent magnet array is more effective in energy conversion than the others, and it can effectively improve the energy harvesting performance for the snake-like WEC.