Experimental investigation on an ocean kinetic energy harvester for underwater gliders

To deal with the energy limitation of underwater gliders, based on existing wave energy converters at home and aboard, a pendulum-type ocean kinetic energy harvester was proposed for sensors energy supply on underwater gliders, which only consists of two conversion systems, and can directly transfer the ocean energy to the generator to improve the conversion efficiency. A prototype device was fabricated and evaluated experimentally with a natural frequency of 1.1Hz at high damping values, and 1Hz at low damping values. The performance of the harvester was studied experimentally on the six degrees of freedom ocean motion simulation platform. It was found the result of the average output power at 1 sea state could reach or more than 150mW, which was enough for sensors energy supply. The results proved that the pendulum-type ocean kinetic energy harvester could be applied on underwater gliders.