Off-Shore Wave Energy Harvesting: a Wec-Microturbine System

This work describes a system for off-shore power generation based on a Wave Energy Converter (WEC) called Seaspoon coupled to a microturbine. The paper reports the performance of the WEC under the action of regular sinusoidal waves investigated with numerical fluid dynamic simulation; such a converter can be coupled to an air microturbine-driven microgenerator into a system for off-shore energy generation. A description of the numerical results and of the microturbine technology is given together withan overview of the system, and its suitable applications.