An offshore wave energy converter (WEC) was successfully launched at the Swedish west coast in the middle of March 2006. The WEC is based on a permanent magnet linear generator located on the sea floor driven by a point absorber. A measuring station has been installed on a nearby island where all measurements and experiments on the WEC have been carried out. The output voltage from the generator fluctuates both in amplitude and frequency and must therefore be converted to enable grid connection. In order to study the voltage conversion, the measuring station was fitted with a six pulse diode rectifier and a capacitive filter during the autumn of 2006. The object of this paper is to present a detailed description of the Lysekil research site. Special attention will be given to the power absorption by the generator when it is connected to a nonlinear load.

The concept concerned in this paper is based on energy conversion of the ocean waves via rotational generators. The objective of this research is to develop a new type of slow-motion converter. The LRTC device consists of a drum that is connected via wire to a floating buoy. The drum is connected to rotary generators. The generators are heavily braked when the direction of movement changes (up/down); this is because the generators have been charged the maximum load in order to obtain maximum output power. For upcoming improvement, the generators should have some power storage as flywheel. In the future experiments, the torque converter can even be tuned to rotate in resonance with the incoming waves, strongly increasing power absorption. Constant force springs are applied for this purpose. The focus of this project is, therefore, a new generation of wave power device for utility-scale energy conversion offering a cost of energy that can compete with established energy resources.

Output power fluctuations from a wave energy converter (WEC) utilizing the principle of an oscillating body are unavoidable due to the reciprocating movement of the translator inside the generator. Moreover, the wave energy flux largely varies with time and propagates with the wave group velocity. Making use of the oscillating output power is a challenge for many wave energy conversion concepts. Therefore, estimation of the output power from a WEC solely by the mean power does not fully reflect the process of energy conversion, especially, by a direct drive linear generator. In the present paper, the output power from the WEC with a linear generator power take-off (PTO) is considered as a stochastic process, and the WEC performance is evaluated from the statistical point of view and related to the linear generator’s (LG) stroke length. Statistics as mean, standard deviation, relative standard deviation, maximum, and mode are found for different sea states. All statistics have shown an expected overall tendency with a rising significant wave height of incoming waves. As the significant wave height increases, statistics of the power output such as mean, standard deviation, maximum, and quantile are increasing, and the mode is decreasing beside the mode for the sea state C. It has been noted that for a significant wave height equal to the LG’s stroke length, the mode is greater than the same values for sea states of other significant wave heights. The results are based on a full-scale offshore experiment and may be used for the design of energy conversion systems based on a linear generator PTO.

This paper analyzes temperature measurements acquired in the offshore operation of a wave energy converter array. The three directly driven wave energy converters have linear generators and are connected to a marine substation placed on the seabed. The highly irregular individual linear generator voltages are rectified and added on a common dc-link and inverted to 50 Hz to facilitate future grid-connection. The electrical power is transmitted to shore and converted to heat in a measuring station. The first results of temperature measurements on substation components and on the stator of one of the linear generators are presented based on operation in linear and in nonlinear damping. The results indicate that there might be some convective heat transfer in the substation vessel. If high power levels are extracted from the waves, this has to be considered when placing components in the substation vessel in order to avoid heating from neighboring components. The results also indicate that the temperature increase in the linear generator stator is very small. Failure due to excessive heating of the stator winding polyvinyl chloride cable insulation is unlikely to occur even in very energetic sea states. Should this conclusion be incorrect, the thermal conductivity between the stator and the hull of the wave energy converter could be enhanced. Another suggested alteration is to lower the resistive losses by reducing the linear generator current density.

The low-RPM Torque Converter (LRTC) is a rotating generator concept for use on the seabed with the driving force from sea waves motion on the sea surface. This concept is built up of two identical generators connected opposite each other via a spring drum with a built-in ball bearing clutch. The drum is connected to a buoy on the sea surface via a wire, the wire is rolled around the spring drum. With sea waves, the buoy moves either upwards or downwards and pulls the wire upwards or downwards. This movement causes the generators to spin. This article presents an upgrade of the LRTC generator concept and upgraded measurement system, both hardware and software. A flywheel system of the thin-disc type has been designed for direct connection to the generator's rotor shaft and an electronic measuring system has also been developed for more accurate measurements and minor disturbances. More detailed tests have been performed both for the purpose of comparing the systems and to explore the performance of the generator concept in more detail. Three different experiments have been done in this article. The first two experiments were performed to investigate the performance of the flywheel and to see the performance of the LRTC system with and without flywheel. The third experiment investigated the optimization of the flywheel mass by increasing the mass of the flywheel with the addition of more thin discs. All movements are simulated with a six-joint industrial robot. Several sinusoidal types of wave motions have been simulated with different time periods and also several real wave climate motions (data taken from fields) have been simulated with the robot. The experiments show that the addition of the flywheel in the LRTC system provides advantages in increasing both peak power, average output power and also softens the output power oscillation.

This paper details a method for strain measurements in the inner framework structure of the single heaving buoy wave energy converter (WEC). This type of the WEC consists of a linear direct drive generator placed on the seafloor and connected to the floating buoy through the connection line. The study focuses on estimation of stress in the inner framework structure of the WEC using strain measurements in the material. Stress in ocean structures is as important as maximum stress. The offshore experiment took place at the Lysekil research site a few kilometers from the Swedish west coast. Stresses had the maximum value when the translator hit an end stop. Interesting observations were made: compressive stress occurred in the framework crossbar at a sea state of 1.32-m waves, but both compressive and tensile stresses occurred at a sea state of 3.2-m waves. A computational procedure employs good results. Error estimation is calculated and represented. This work is a step that may influence future design of wave energy devices in terms of the material aspect, survivability in a hard wave climate, and cost-effective renewable energies.