Power Harvesting Systems for Use with In-water Instrumentation

Energy harnessing technology must be tuned to the environment that they harness. The ocean harnesses energy created by the sun storing most of it in the surface in the form of heat, light, and kinetic energy. The deeper in the ocean you travel, your options become reduced. Near the ocean floor there is essentially only one viable source still present besides biological energy. It is kinetic energy in the form of a small slow moving current that changes direction. Typically, the current will be 0.25 m/s. Turbines are unrealistic due to bio-growth and the small amount of power available. A solution presents itself in the form of vibrations created by vortex shedding. On the freeway in older model vehicles, an antenna will start to move side to side and back and forth violently at certain speeds. This is when a long cylinder reaches its intrinsic resonant frequency. Take this antenna, and instead of suppressing this effect, we maximize it, tune it, and mount it onto a circular rigid base plate sandwiching numerous, specially designed piezoelectric vibration harnessing generators. You now have a system that can capture slow moving current energy from any direction, for the use of sea floor transducers.