Experimental Investigation On The Performance Of The Oscillating Buoy Wave Power Device

Scientists of many countries have investigated wave energy, as a kind of clean, renewable energy, for many years. Because of its high reliability, the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) wave power device is adopted widely in some European countries where the wave power levels in KW/m crest length is larger. But disadvantages of this device can not be ignored: (1) it is expensive and difficult to be built. (2) It is of low efficiency. So for some countries where the energy stream is lower, just as China, it is unadvisable to adopt this device.The Oscillating buoy wave power Device (OD) investigated in this paper consists of a buoy placed in a port and some hydraulic or mechanical devices mounted on the coast. The buoy extracts wave energy and drives a generator through the hydraulic or mechanical devices to generate electricity. The advantages of this device are that it is cheaper and high efficient, as a cost, the reliability of this device is lowered. So this device is attractive to some countries where the wave energy stream is lower. With effective protection the performance of this device will be impervious to its low reliability.There are five chapters in this thesis: chapter 1 is the foreword and chapter 5 is the conclusion. In chapter 2, we optimize parameters affecting the performance of the device by calculation, and gain the optimal parameters. In chapter 3, the test model is designed according to the above optimization results, and the model has good practicability. In chapter 4, we investigate the OD by experiment. The experimental results show that: the capture width ratio of the OD is nearly equal to that of the OWC;the total efficiency of the OD is much higher than that of the OWC. Therefore the OD is a promising wave power device.