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Abstract
Unmanned marine equipment has been increasingly developed for open seas. The lack of efficient and reliable power supply is currently one of the bottlenecks restricting the practical application of these devices. In order to provide a viable power supply method for unmanned marine equipment, such as sonic buoys and sea robots, we originally propose a novel small-scale flexible blade wave energy converter (WEC) based on self-adaptable counter-rotating operation mechanism. The flexible blade WEC is designed on the basis of the rigid blade WEC with the caging device. This paper identifies the key factors affecting WEC performance through theoretical analysis. According to the numerical simulation analysis, the output mechanical power of the double-layer absorber is 12.8 W, and the hydraulic efficiency is 36.3%. The results of the verification experiment show that the peak power of WEC is 5.8 W and the average power is 3.2 W. The WEC with 65Mn flexible blade under most experimental conditions has the best performance when the blade thickness is 0.10 mm. The study shows that the new generation WEC can effectively overcome the excessive fluctuation of the output power of the previous generation WEC. The output power curve of the novel WEC is relatively smooth, which is conducive to its smooth operation and subsequent utilization and storage of electrical energy.
Highlights
Due to the rapid development of marine science and technology and the actual demand for marine resources exploitation, a large number of unmanned marine equipment has been developed and gradually entered the commercial stage [1,2,3,4]
This paper proposes a new type of small-scale flexible blade wave energy converter (WEC), which is based on the self-adaptable counter-rotating operation mechanism
The small WEC is expected to be used as a power supply module for low-power unmanned marine equipment to solve the research bottleneck of the lack of efficient and reliable energy supply methods
Summary
Due to the rapid development of marine science and technology and the actual demand for marine resources exploitation, a large number of unmanned marine equipment has been developed and gradually entered the commercial stage [1,2,3,4]. It can be seen that the current wave energy research mainly focuses on the development of large-scale wave energy converter (WEC) powering grid and off-grid application [16,26,27]. The power requirements of marine equipment are relatively small, and most of them work in the open sea [7], so it is difficult to directly apply the existing wave energy technology mentioned above. The current point absorber still takes high sea states as its working background, and its application goal is to develop large-scale devices. Such applications do not fully exploit the performance advantages of small point absorber in simplifying structure and improving efficiency. The remaining chapters of this paper are organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the structural improvement, conceptual design and working principle of the new WEC; Section 3 theoretically analyzes and numerically simulates the performance characteristics of the new WEC, especially its flexible blades; Section 4 presents the verification experiments of the WEC; Section 5 draws the conclusions for the study
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