
“This proved to be a poor assumption on my part,” Polagye recalls. First, Polagye and others thought powering the adaptable monitoring package would “only be slightly more complicated” than plugging it into the existing battery banks onboard the Lifesaver. This project sure has had its share of challenges. That has the potential to transform how we think about coastal and ocean security, to say nothing of frontiers in ocean science.” With the Lifesaver powering us, we can collect as much data as we want for as long as we want. For example, over the last month, if we had tried to run the Wave-Powered Adaptable Monitoring Package on battery power, we would have consumed the equivalent of several hundred automotive batteries. “Projects like this one show that marine energy may, at least in the near term, be better suited to providing power in the open ocean where none is available today. “Since I’ve been involved in marine energy research and development, the common assumption has been that these technologies (like the Lifesaver) would only be deployed in large arrays to provide power to coastal grids, in the same way as terrestrial and offshore wind do today,” Polagye says. That energy is then stored in a battery bank on the structure. The wave energy converter being tested uses three removable power units that convert the motion of passing waves to electrical power by way of rotary electrical generators.
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Till now, that meant the use of portable batteries, which are expensive and require a tremendous amount of effort and money to be replaced when they die. That’s critical because all of the forms of scientific equipment in the ocean requires power to operate. Studying this helps to make sure we can minimize our environmental footprint underwater.” “And to do this, we need to use a variety of sensors-sonar, acoustics, for instance. “Regulators want to know if turtles or other sea creatures are becoming entangled in the moorings,” he explains.
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His focus is not just how to capture and convert the energy from the waves but understanding the environmental impact of the wave energy converter equipment moored offshore. This is the world’s first demonstration of the potentially transformative capability for wave-energy converters to enable persistent oceanographic observation and unmanned, undersea vehicle recharging without a cable to shore.īrian Polagye, ’05, ’09, associate professor of mechanical engineering, runs a UW research group that focuses on the conversion of marine renewable energy resources (river, tidal and ocean currents, as well as waves) to mechanical power.


Olsen’s BOLT Lifesaver wave energy device has two primary aims: improving the reliability and power performance of the device through alterations to the device mooring and control strategy and demonstrating an alternative means of powering oceanographic instrumentation without using utility-supplied electrical grid power or single-use batteries. At the UW, the experiment involved researchers, faculty and students from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics Lab.Ĭurrent testing of Fred. This is why a team of engineers from the UW joined forces with a UW-incubated startup named WiBotic, the University of Hawaii, Europe-based Fred. But in the near future, wave energy may be the best option to generate power for undersea scientific stations, drones and sensors. This power-from-paradise idea is light years from powering up the electrical grid to light up cities in the islands or anywhere else, if at all. This location is currently the only grid-connected wave energy test site in North America and has hosted several wave energy converter tests. Navy established the Wave Energy Test Site in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
