Project Oceanus
By: Brenda Trinh, Jennie Diaz, Sean Colley, and Edwin Guzman
Department: Mechanical Engineering
Faculty Advisor: Dr. George Anwar
Efficient energy production is paramount to the socioeconomic development of a community. Efficient and clean energy production allows for the socioeconomic growth of that community without going through the extremely destructive industrialization that all major countries participated in during their industrial revolution. Residents of the small island communities, such as Indonesia, have little to no electrical infrastructure. To increase electrical access to communities, affordable, clean, and relative low-cost options are necessary. Current humanitarian aid often uses diesel generators to create power, which also requires shipping diesel fuel. Furthermore, bottled water is often shipped too, as the communities lack access to potable water, and cannot desalinate ocean water at a large enough scale, due to a lack of electrical infrastructure. Communities near bodies of the ocean could have an option to harvest energy from ocean wave generators, allowing for 24-hour energy production. Utilizing sinusoidal tidal motion and the surge effect, we have proposed an inverted pendulum design, that pumps hydraulic fluid into a hydraulic gear motor that powers a generator. This inverted pendulum can be swapped out with pendulums of different heights to accommodate for the specific depths and surge heights. Since our design uses the tides rather than ocean currents to generate power, placement, installation, and maintenance is far simpler, where the apparatus can be installed less than 500 meters from shore, as opposed to turbine designs that can only be used at river mouths, dams, and deep-sea ocean currents far from shore. To be nondestructive to marine life, the use of turbines was immediately ruled out, as their high-speed rotation is known to be lethal to most animals that encounter it. The inverted pendulum design moves at the same rate as the tides, preserving marine life.