Tidal-Wave Energy idea!

[Roxbury]

:rainbow: Tidal Energy: I had an idea for a maybe smaller kind of ocean wave-electricity generator and heres a brief description.First I had an offbeat idea about tidal wave technology and of all things kraft dinner noodles,you know the hollow,pipe-like pasta?

 

Anyway I wondered if a cluster (hundreds or thousands?) or flexible (plastic) hollow pipes could be used along ocean shorelines to generate electricity.These pipes would be standing up (floating) in the tide vertically,and attached at the bottom (on a swinging pivot) to an anchored base,(or maybe suspended vertically beneath a float?)

 

What I thought was the waves continually hitting the shore,would push the flexible,nearly submerged pipes backwards and forwards,similiar to how the waves push sea-grass and seaweeds (kelp) back and forth.Unfortunately thats as far as I got - I don't know what the pipes could be hooked up to,or in what mechanical way,to generate electricity? Or wether some various (magnetic and copper) liquids could be inserted in seperate halves (compartments) of the pipes to generate electricity.

 

Again the basic idea is a cluster or clusters of flexible pipes submerged and anchored near the tide/shore line,that are pushed back and forth by the waves and tide and each pipe contains a compartmentalized, electricity generating copper and magnetic solution - and/or the movement of the pipes rotates a mini electrical generator at its base?

 

 

Regardless,seeing how much and how great the wave energy is along the seashores,it probably should be exploited.Any opinions you have on this would be welcome

 

Roxy

[Buffy]

Welcome to Hypography, Roxy!

 

Tidal energy has been around for quite a while, read the wikipedia article here. There are even a few implementations of it producing energy:

 

http://www.nspower.ca/AboutUs/OurBusiness/PowerProduction/HowWeGeneratePower/Hydro.html#ANN

http://www.bigelow.org/virtual/handson/water_level.html

 

Just try googling "tidal energy". You don't need a tidal wave to get it either!

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[C1ay]

Kind of like this Roxbury?

[Roxbury]

:rainbow: Yes I'm well aware of tidal power projects from the Bay of Fundy to Scotland! But they haven't tried the system I'm proposing,(either in large or small scale) - one in which waves that hit the shore are used to move clusters of "flexible pipes" back and forth to generate electrical power! If you know of a similiar system I'd really appreciate finding out about it!!!

[arkain101]

I designed a concept for efficient tide power, which may help give you some ideas for your wave power concept.

 

Ill just cut and paste it here.

 

FYI-the spoon effect (aka wing effect for lift) will most likely not be applicable to flowing water in a hold. Like tide flow in a channel due to the fact it will just displace water, where as the tap-spoon setup allows the water to freely go where it likes without displaces more water..

 

Okay, you know the effect that occurs when you take a glass and put it under water letting all the air escape, then, turn it upside down and as you try to pull it out of the water there is a suction effect that holds it down.

 

You go out to a place in the ocean, build a large square box. Aprox, 100 feet by 100 feet and 5 feet tall. with sealing doors both on the top and the bottom of the box. Okay so we hook up towers to this device all around, about 50 towers or so. Now there is no water in the box and the tide is down. As the tide comes up the bouyancee of this box causes it to float and as the tide goes up, it turns massive generators with great pressure. Now when the tide is full and slack, doors open and we let the box fill with water. Now when the tide goes out we have a GIGANTUON weight force pulling down as we use the suction effect and the weight of the water to turn generators with a very high gear ratio, so the generators might be humming at 10,000rpm while the box slowly tugs down 1inch every 10mins. Now then the tide is all the way down, the doors open and let the gravity pump all the water out. Again its all air now and when the tide comes around again.. cycle returns. Its a 1stroke system, and would have so much energy that it would be hard to attatch enough generaters to make use of it.

 

In the concept I came up with here. Lets say we have a 50foot by 50foot deck and a set of towers around the pad and all along the inside aswell to give it structural strength. It would look like a grid of towers standing on the ocean floor with a large pad that is able float up and down on these towers. Lets make the pad 10 feet tall.

here we have 2500 x10= 25,000cubic feet (1 cubic feet = 28.3168466 liters) 28x25,000= 700,000 litres 1kg=1litre = 688tons of water not including the suction effect that will turn generators for as long as the tide is in motion.

thats alot of energy. 7,000,000newtons x 5m tide = 35,000,000 KJ's of energy, then add in the estimation of about 1.5 x's the force with suction, 52million kj's.

Pretty rough estimates but thats just a small one.

I came up with this concept awhile back.. but today I spent a moment on it and pictured how to make it work as I planned.

I see it working flawlessly.

 

And with this design it is capable of making power at all times. Maybe not as much but still power.

WHen the deck is at the bootom on its rest plates on the several towers. it is still full of water. Tide is slack, deck is stopped. One would think the power generation is over with. But As we drain the water we drain it through a turbine. and the gravity pulls the water out and makes a energy. Also, we put a air turbine like ones used in air pressure tide power. So when the water rushes out, air rushes in, causing the air flow and water flow to make power as the deck sits still. Once shes full of air.. All the doors close up. Tide comes up and it floats up making power. Now when it reaches its rest at high slack tide. It opends the doors again. The weight of the deck (which would be immense) sinks under gravity. The water that is forced in goes through the turbine again, and the air the is forced out through the top turns a turbine aswell. once it is fully packed with water, the multiple towers lock the deck from sinking any further. The Top floor openings are sealed up. Now we either at this point seal the bottom passages so its one big sealed water tank or, we leave it open (if this suction effect that I dont understand that well actually has a stronger effect than the weight of the water alone). Now as the tide goes down this millions of pounds of water is suspended by the towers held in the deck. the locks are released as the tide gets near the bottom of the deck. Gears attatched to the towers and deck or hydraulics take over and turn generators. The generators need to be powerful or numreous enough to stop the deck from moving, the motoin of the deck is maintained through the electrical drag of the hundreds of generators. Tide starts to slack out again. We release the water and make a little bit of power again.

See with this system the entire available mass is put to nearlly 100% use. Where as turbines only cut through the mass and let almost all of it slip by while it captures what it can making it far less productive.

I dont know how big these could be built but. Over here on the west coast I have seen nearly 20 foot tides in ciratain areas. You build one to have the production of a couple hoover dam's and your in some serious business.

 

And remember that tides are not just moving up and down water, they are flowing water filling basins. So while this water flows past this structure it can like wise be captured by dam like turbines.

 

In fact have you ever take a spoon and put the back side of it under a tap. You might expect the spoon to get pushed away. But it creates the same lift effect as an air plane and the spoon will become glued to the moving water. The bottom shape of this deck could be made in such a way to Glue it to the flowing water aswell, forcing it to be sucked down with the dropping water levels. Add all that together, you might aswell cover the deck in solar panels. or windmills, since some parts of the ocean are cursed with constant high winds. Then we could really make use of those huricanes that are usually a pain.

 

Then all of this power should be directed to a Momentum station. That is what most electric stations do anyway. They use large capacitors to prevent fluctioation in the electric flow. But if you were to hook this all up to a massive spinning wheel on the ground, that one was to make very friction free. Then have it spinning very quickly, if you could balance such an object. Then it would smooth out the electric flow and (and of course use up some of it) but keep it going when the station is under low power..

Not to sure about the big momentum wheel but.. it was a quick though.

 

So you see this concept is always generating power. you could literally power the whole country with a few of these. Think of it.

[InfiniteNow]

Here are a few other methods. I was watching a show called "Discoveries this week" on the Discovery Science Channel and they discussed some of these. It reminded me of your post. Anyway... cheers!

 

 

http://www.oceanpd.com/

http://www.eere.energy.gov/RE/ocean_wave.html

http://www.sustainablehawaii.com/wavenpg1.htm

[GoatBoater]

Afternoon All,

 

I know this thread has been a bit quiet of late but please allow me to stir it up a little bit.

 

What we appear to be talking about are Wave Energy Converters (WEC's) and Tidal flow generators (the other technology usually confused with these is Tidal barage - which is basically a tidal driven Hydro Dam and involves storing water). WEC and Tidal flow use the naturally occuring energies of the ocean to generate power.

 

WECs and Tidal devices are very different though. A Tidal device uses a flow of water, somekind of tidal rip current, to drive turbines. Useful tidal zones are not common but where they exist they are incredibly predictable (a tide table and a simple calculator and you can plan 1000 years ahead quite simply - apparently).

 

WECs are different because they use Ocean Waves. These are less predictable than tides but considerably more prevalent. Almost without exception WEC utilize unbroken longwave length waves, i.e. green waves and most take energy from the verticle movement of the wave. Ocean waves are used because shore waves have already lost a huge amount of energy thought friction with the sea bed, and broken waves are more destuctive.

 

Current working technologies (my research is basically european so please forgive any units I might miss from elsewhere - I would of course be more than happy to here about them).

 

Tidal

 

Marine Current Turbines (marineturbines.com) is the only turbine company I know of with a demonstrator in the water. It is a 300 kW unit the UK Coast at Lynmouth. They are currently installing a 1MW unit in a tidal loch in Northern Ireland.

 

WEC

 

Shore-based

 

Pico - OWC on PICO in the Azores

Islay - OWC on Islay in the Shetland Isles, Scotland (wavegen.co.uk/what_we_offer_limpet_islay.htm)

 

Floating

 

WaveBob (breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=176113818&p=y76yy45z4) Has recently been flaoted.

 

Wave Dragon (wavedragon.co.uk / wavedragon.net) has had a unit in the water since 2003.

 

So far as I can see these are the only two Ocean Wave devices that are actually out there at the moment.

 

Wave Dragon is currently trying to install a 7MW unit of the coast of Pembrokshire and have announced a 50MW wave farm off portugal.

 

Pelamis (oceanpd.com) have a very successful unit that has been extensively tested in Scotland and they are just about to install Europes first wave energy farm off the Coast of Portugal. Three of their 750 kW units will be hooked up to the grid which will also mark the first ocaassion that anyone has tested / used WEC arrays ever.

 

I hope that any body who drifts across this will see that this is a very interesting time to be in Wave or Tidal energy.

 

GB

[cwes99_03]

The key would be placement in areas that have a large rise and fall in tide. There are areas in iceland or new foundland that have tide rise and fall of 50 feet. These would work wonders in those areas.

 

The city of Venice has some neat tidal energy turbines. I recommend reading up on what they have and are doing now to see if that interestes you.

[GoatBoater]

High tidal differences power tidal barrage devices - there has been quite a lot of work on this. We need to look into these technologies as well as tidal stream and wave energy.

 

GB

[cwes99_03]

Another thing, I was under the impression that rip currents often traveled parallel to shore is that right? Anyway, what is so hard about creating anchored water mills with watervanes on them, just like the old windmills here in the midwest used to work.

[GoatBoater]

Tidal currents in a country like the UK, with a very high tidal range and a (for use of a better word) crinkly coast, are usually formed by a difference in tide heights around a peninsular or area of coast line - or when flow is constricted through narrows in marine topography. The tidal flow then runs to re-equilibriate that imbalance. So yes, in this country they can often be parallel to shore, or at least very close to it. But tidal streams also appear for other reasons, salinity gradients in the mid-Pacific for instance.

 

The 'underwater windmill' is still the basic tenent of the tidal stream world (w.marineturbines.com or w.swanturbines.co.uk), simple and effective. But the power of the tide is not to be underestimated. There has been more than one prototype that has been deployed and effortlessly decimated by the next tide. Great power to be harnessed, but greater almost needed in the harnessing.

 

GB

[cwes99_03]

Yah hadn't considered that in the 30 seconds of thought I gave it. The sheer mass of the water molecules moving across the surface would put a ton more strain on the propellors than wind currents moving at comparable speeds. I did however expect to have to beef them up comparitively. In the midwest the vains on the back had springs attached so that in a particularly strong wind, it could fold over and stop the propellors from turning. Ours worked like a charm its entire life (more than 100 years) with little maintenance, until one particularly bad storm got the vain to flap over into the blades and tore it all to pieces.