There is no shortage of ideas in that list of applications, and I thought I knew most of them!
One entry that has fascinated me for some time is the Spindrift Energy device, a simple elegant robust concept of Brian Moffat. It must have been one of those eureka moments that he then made into a working model in his backyard for pocket money. It worked immediately.
It utilises the water particle motion of a wave at the surface (very low velocity) to drive a rotor at the bottom of a long vertical tube. In one sweep the elegant contribution was to put a velocity multiplier in form of a constriction (a venturi) at the tube end where the rotor is positioned. It increased the water speed about 20 times and thus making it a feasible device. The drive shaft goes to the surface where the generator is situated.
As always, the questions that arise are, can it remain sufficiently robust when the tube lengths need to be ~ 50 m (depth), what are the viscous losses in the tube, what of the maintenance accessibility, and what might be the overall cost (low I suspect)?
Working with only a meagre group of friends Moffat has already won a prize of $99 000 (with a larger scale version). Winning the present kind of competition could put his WEC on the map. He might even set up a company.
(For my own ruminations on using a velocity multiplier, it was one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-that moments. Hats off to Moffat.)
www.spindriftenergy.com
Juke
There is no shortage of ideas in that list of applications, and...
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