STOCKHOLM: A swedish company, CorPower Ocean has taken up the challenge to utilise the wave power to its fullest and convert it into electricity. It even won EUR 100,000 prize money at MIT Building Global innovators Demo Day recently. CorPower has built their wave power harnessing system based on the gear technology developed at KTH. The company claims that their system can generate 5x more energy per ton of device at a third of the cost with respect to the other competing technologies.
CorPower Ocean engineers have developed a high-efficiency Wave Energy Converter (WEC) that derives its inspiration from the pumping principles of human heart. The WEC is of point absorber type that has buoy moored to the sea-bed with a flexible connection. The motion of the wave causes the buoy to move up and down and connected drivetrain converts this movement into electricity. The USP of the CorPower’s system is that it can cover the entire spectrum of the wave and not just a part of it like the competing systems. Specially developed algorithms allow the CorPower system to calculate the timing between waves and buoy so that the drivetrain is engaged all the time. The system is therefore able to control movement of the buoy through the crest and trough no matter how long or high the incoming wave is.
A Buoy with about 8m diameter can be manufactured at economical rates and can produce about 250-300 kW power in a typical Atlantic environment. The system is typically deployed as an array of buoys synched with each other and can produce about 25-30 MW power.
