Wave Energy Harvesting to Power LiDAR Buoys

Due to increased pressure from climate change and global energy insecurity, there has been a surge in demand for renewable energy. One potential market has been severely underutilized: marine renewable energy. Buoy-mounted LiDAR systems are being used to understand site-specific physical and environmental responses to renewable energy development, which is critical to reducing time and costs associated with planning, developing, and permitting. These LiDAR buoys have significant power requirements that are difficult to meet with on-board solar and wind sources. The overall objective is to develop a wave energy converter to provide renewable power for LiDAR buoys. This marine renewable energy can offset carbon emissions from diesel generators and enable longer missions with greater reliability. In Phase I and the initial Phase II, the team developed detailed designs for a wave energy converter for LiDAR buoys. These designs were influenced by two separate wave tank testing campaigns, mathematical modeling, and simulations. Various sub-systems were tested at a benchtop scale and a full-scale prototype will be fabricated and deployed before the end of Phase II. In the proposed Phase IIA project, the team will conduct two separate deployments to advance the wave energy converter design. In the second budget period, the wave energy converter will be deployed with a working LiDAR buoy at a calibration and certification site to validate that the device does not impact LiDAR measurements. In addition to enabling increased performance and reliability for LiDAR buoys, variations of the proposed WEC can be used to provide power for other Blue Economy uses including ocean observing buoys, navigational buoys, create UUV recharging nodes, offshore aquaculture, and other marine applications at various scales.