Ocean Energy Extraction for Sensor Applications

“Ocean Energy Extraction for Sensor Applications” has applications on buoy systems to be used by the United States Navy to increase situational awareness and battle-group integration by enabling power independent data acquisition and distributed sensor networks. Electro Standards Laboratories proposes to meet the requirements with mechanical wave energy extraction accomplished using integrated electrical generators. This work develops, demonstrates, and tests, direct-drive wave-energy conversion concepts. A detailed system model is developed to predict scalability of the proposed system to higher power levels. Form factor constraints are considered and the system is optimized for different deployment strategies. This approach is designed to achieve the goal of inexpensive, compact, efficient and reliable wave energy harvesting.