They have the potential to produce clean renewable energy in an environmentally sound manner. They also offer greater reliability than solar or wind energy generators and lower visual and auditory impact than wind turbines. Moreover, they can be made available near many centers of population and industry. Despite these benefits, widespread adoption of wave power harvesting has been hampered by engineering, economic, and logistical factors.
For example, conventional systems have proven expensive due to a need to overengineer their structure to deal with storms. To address these drawbacks, we have done research in partnership with the HYPER DRIVE Corporation Japan to develop harvesting systems that can effectively convert hydrodynamic energy into electrical power through simple and low-cost solutions. This work included two sea trials in which a complete energy-harvesting system was deployed at sea.
The first such system was based on a suspended proof mass that stretched its springlike muscle material as the buoy heaved on the waves. The system was a proof-of-principle demonstration of how a buoy, such as a navigation buoy, might use ocean waves to power its onboard lighting or instrumentation and communications systems. However, this was not practical for large-scale power generation to feed the electricity grid because of the large-size proof mass that would then be needed.
Instead, we developed a proof-of-principle system directly using hydrodynamic energy to mechanically stretch and contract dielectric elastomers see Figure 2. For logistical convenience we used the same oceanographic buoy as the proof-mass system, which would ultimately not be suitable in an optimized system.
This device produced an output of more than 25J in laboratory testing. Namely, it used about g of active dielectric elastomer material with an energy density of more than 0. At sea, half this energy density was measured, thus yielding about 11J. Such performance levels suggest that dielectric elastomers may indeed be practical for large-scale power generation.
We have shown that dielectric elastomers can effectively harvest kinetic energy in both small- and large-scale applications. In the future, we hope to leverage our experience to further develop these and other kinetic energy harvesting applications by addressing the technical challenges related to system design and lifetime.
His research interests include the development of new materials, systems, and devices for energy harvesting, robotics, and other applications, including aerospace and biomedical devices. Sign In View Cart 0 Help. News Menu. Low-cost electroactive polymers allow exploitation of kinetic energy from sources that are both large scale, such as waves, and small scale, such as human activity. Roy D. Figure 1. Heel-strike generator based on a dielectric elastomer.
Photo of the device installed in a boot top left and cross section top right and bottom. The fluid or gel coupling medium forces the polymer to stretch when the heel is compressed, thus producing electricity. Figure 2. Dielectric elastomer ocean wave power generator based on an articulated, multibody system buoy at sea trial site top and concatenated rolls in a generator module bottom.
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