A systematic approach for designing a highly efficient linear electrical generator for harvesting oceanic wave energy

Abstract

Recently, generation of electrical power from the oceanic wave draws incredible attention to the researchers and engineers. Although, oceanic wave energy is gigantic and available to most of the earth's surface, it is still unused because of the lack of technological excellence in the past decades. Therefore, research gap is created in this regard specially extraction of electrical power from the oceanic wave. In this paper, wave energy devices and optimization of the linear electrical generator (LEG) that mainly converts the mechanical energy (from the device) into electricity are presented in detail with finite element analysis (FEA). The methodology involves analysis of the design, observation of its electrical and magnetic properties, optimization, different copper windings, enhancement of output power, maximizing the efficiency of the LEG, and power density. To test the proposed method, an LEG is designed using the computer aided design software. Its geometry is then imported to ANSYS software for conducting FEA. The generated power, electrical, and magnetic properties of the LEG are observed for various conditions. Optimization procedure is parallelly conducted with FEA to ensure extracting the maximum output power and efficiency. Various magnetic materials are analyzed for selecting proper magnetic core and the permanent magnet to further increase the output power. Simulation results show that because of applying the proposed design method to the LEG with optimization, approximately 93.9% efficiency and 530 kW/m3 power density are achieved for 2 m/s velocity of the translator, which is the highest among almost all other existing LEGs so far.