Study on a Salter's Duck Wave Energy Converter Integrated with an In-built Mechanical Motion Rectifier

• Tech Stack: MATLAB, WEC-Sim, Ansys AQWA, Solidworks, Simulink
• Report URL: Project Link

In this project, a unique design for a Wave Energy Converter was proposed, designed, modelled and simulated. The proposed WEC uses a novel Mechanical Motion Rectifier design to convert bidirectional pitching motion to unidirectional rotation.

During the course of this project, hydrodynamic analysis of different configurations of the WEC model was performed to find out the optimum configuration based on the motion response, power output, and the performance bandwidth. Hydrodynamic coefficients were obtained using the BEM Code, Ansys AQWA which solves potential flow theory for the input geometry.

Later, the wave conditions were simulated using an open source Matlab code developed by Sandia National Labs. Finally, the analysis and results of different configurations of the proposed idea were compared and an optimum configuration was recommended.