Energy provision is the biggest issue to face for the world’s economy at any latitude. Nowadays the energy demand of developing countries as well as that one of developed economies is huge and increasing at an unbearable pace. Considering the limited stocks of such an energy source, and the drawbacks related to the emissions associated to its utilization, the problem to find alternative energy sources and suitable conversion technologies must be solved in order to guarantee the growth and preserve the planet environment.Among renewable energies sources, Ocean waves power, around the coasts worldwide, has been estimated to be in the order of 8,000-80,000TWh/y. The conversion of this resource into sustainable electrical power represents a major opportunity to nations endowed with such a kind of resource.At the present time most technological innovations aimed at exploiting such resource are at early stage of development, with only a handful of devices close to be at the commercial demonstration stage. Very few of them, though, operates converting the wave energy contents at its very origin: the orbital motion of water particles right below the ocean surface.The Seaspoon device catches the kinetic energy of ocean waves with promising efficiency conversion performance, according to specific “wave-motion climate”.The performance of the device has been assessed through numerical model simulation performed in MATLAB environment. Defined an optimal geometry of the device for given wave parameters (H,T), a scale model will be tested with regular waves in a wave flume at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (DIME) of the University of Genova.
