Next wave in powering ocean buoys

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The dream of wave-powered electricity, like most renewable energy ideas, is sweeping and transformative. The vision builds to utility-scale ocean generators lighting up cities as they bob in the ocean.
But successful commercial wave energy may start smaller, say, by lighting up a buoy, and emerge from a place without large ocean swells, like Rhode Island.
That’s the vision of researchers at Electro Standards Laboratories in Cranston, who for the last five years have been working with the University of Rhode Island on systems to power the thousands of ocean buoys around the world without batteries or sunlight.
It’s not as flashy as lighting homes, but there’s certainly a need for power on buoys that, among other things, monitor the weather, listen for enemy submarines, watch for tsunamis, measure the salinity of the water, track ocean currents and warn of navigational hazards.
“Now we have an energy source that exists in the middle of the ocean and can power anything with a sensor,” said Electro Standards President Raymond Sepe Sr. “We can also communicate with the sensors and operate them remotely.”
Today, most buoys are powered by one of two methods – batteries and solar power – that have distinct drawbacks.
Batteries are dependable and powerful in all kinds of offshore environments, but they need to be replaced.
While changing a battery on the side of the road is simple, thousands of miles from land, in a heaving ocean, it’s a lengthy, expensive proposition.
Solar power has the opposite problem.
It can run forever under the right conditions, but those conditions often don’t exist where the devices are needed.
In high latitudes sunlight is scarce for half the year. In milder climates, sea birds find raised solar panels an ideal perch. Their droppings can compromise even the most-efficient solar cells. A wave-powered system could not only avoid those challenges, but take advantage of being located in the places that cause other systems the greatest problems.
The farther a buoy is from land, the more powerful and consistent the swells it’s exposed to.
Wave power represents only one of many projects Electro Standards is working on at any given time.
Founded in 1976, the company manufactures, tests, develops and provides services in a wide range of electrical-engineering areas, such as fiber-optic cables, battery systems, telecommunications, data transmission, power generation and hybrid motors.
While developing and manufacturing its own products, Electro Standard, which employs approximately 70 people, also works on projects for other firms on a contract basis.
The family-run company has won numerous military contracts and is now working on a new system for the U.S. Navy to launch jets from aircraft carriers using electromagnetism instead of steam catapults.
Working with and hiring students from Rhode Island universities is a core strategy of Electro Standards and the wave-powered sensor-buoy project took off when Sepe and then-University of Rhode Island oceanography professor Malcolm Spaulding began talking about it at a conference.
URI students had previously tested a wave-energy system developed by Rockwell International that hadn’t been successful. But Spaulding believed that, while it might not work on a utility scale, the right system could generate enough juice to keep an offshore buoy running.
Electro had just such a system in development so the company and school began a partnership in which URI would design buoys and test them installed with Electro’s prototypes in Narragansett Bay. “They have launch capability, a boat, and in partnership we put in their wave tank and got them out on the bay,” Sepe said. “In the winter we take them back and do more work. Then they put them out on the water again.”
In 2007, Electro Standards was awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. Department of Defense for the project, which was followed in 2009 by a $200,000 R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council grant.
Electro Standards has developed two wave-power systems: one a “direct drive” that converts the movement of the buoy into power, like a crank flashlight, and a “resonant drive” that uses the pull of the buoy as it rises and falls on the waves against its mooring to make power.
After years of research and tests, Electro Standards is encouraged enough by the results that it is now talking to potential investors and customers about it.
Spaulding, who retired from URI this year and is now a consultant with Applied Science Associates in South Kingstown, said the Navy or another organization where buoy maintenance has become an expensive problem would be good candidates to invest in the wave-power system.
“For the Navy, there are … places they don’t want [a buoy] to show up, something covert where they want to get the data back,” Spaulding said.
As universities in Rhode Island and elsewhere focus on seeding innovation by commercializing their research, the wave-power project shows how ideas can flow both ways, with breakthroughs in private labs seeding academic work.
The partnership with Electro Standards has provided hands-on experience and years of senior design projects.
“Our goal is to hire from within Rhode Island as much as possible,” Sepe said. “This provides an opportunity and helps fight against the brain drain.” •

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