Study on the use of ocean wave as renewable energy

Abstract

The increase in oil prices, the depletion of coal resources and the possible threat to the environment due to effluents from fossil fuels has prompted the technological developments in the utilization of renewable sources of energy such as ocean wave, etc. The ocean is the world’s largest collector and storage medium for solar energy. At the same time, it produces various forms of energy while interacting with the atmosphere. Wave energy is an indirect and condensed form of solar energy. Wave gathers their energy from the wind. Wave gather, store and transmit this energy thousands of kilometers with little loss. As long as sun shines, wave energy will never be depleted. Indirect use of thermo-fluid engineering knowledge is applied to convert wave energy as useful energy. The wave energy conversion activities should be preceded by the estimation of wave power potential which needs the collection of wave data all along the coastline of the countries. Assessing the performance of a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) that is, predicting the effective amount of energy converted from the incident wave field over certain period of time in nominal operation conditions necessarily requires a precise knowledge of the local wave climate. The main wave characteristics are commonly given in terms wave height, period, direction of propagation and power. The power in wave can be expressed by the formula P = 0.55 H2s T, kW per meter of crest length, where Hs, is the significant wave height in meter and T, is wave energy period in seconds. This paper aims to describe the importance of data, data collection methods, important parameters to estimate the potential wave energy, available wave energy conversion methods, economic and environmental impacts. Power and energy efficiency relationships are discussed.