Wave energy harvesting for powering buoy-based sensors

Abstract

In the past few years, data buoys have been widely developed and deployed for remote atmospheric and oceanographic observations. Wave, wind and other data collected from these buoys are critical for dangerous storm and hurricane forecast. Currently, such buoys are designed to include solar panels and backup batteries as power supply for the sensors installed. An alternative solution to provide power for these buoys is to harvest the wave energy pervasively around them, which eliminates the costly battery replacement and the weather constraints on solar panels. In this paper, we propose to use the piezoelectric transducers to harness the wave energy for powering buoy-based sensors. Magnets are exploited to generate impulses to vibrate the cantilever beam with piezoelectric transducers bonded, such that the low-frequency wave motions can be converted to high-frequency vibrations of the beam. In the laboratory test, low-frequency sinusoidal motions are generated by a shaker to simulate wave heave motions. Experimental parametric study is conducted to investigate the performance of the simplified energy harvesting prototype, given various parameters such as the gap and pole configuration between the magnets as well as different wave conditions.