Development of a Wave Buoy Device For Energy Harvesting: Renewable Energy

摘要

Sea waves represent an important store of energy that can be extracted to produce energy. Nowadays, many researches are carried out in this context to explore the waves' capacity and to develop new waves' harvesting technologies. This arising importance given to waves' energy is driven by the increasing need to renewable energy sources. Also, environmental awareness and sustainability have become part of the living ethics. Sun, winds are classical sources of renewable energy. The exploit of these sources have progressed to reach a considerable level. However, the extraction of sea waves' energy is not yet sufficiently developed worldwide, especially in Lebanon. For this purpose, in this paper, a wave buoy device -an energy harvesting system- is designed and calculated. A prototype of this system is manufactured and assembled. It is then tested on the Lebanese coast to elaborate the experimental results. The efficiency of the whole system and the produced power were determined based on the parameters measured during the tests. The obtained results show that sea waves are a very promising source of clean energy. They have a great potential to generate electric power by means of different waves converting devices. However, the calculated efficiency of the proposed device is small. In future studies, the development of the “optimum wave energy converting device” is one of the major challenges of ongoing.