Recent Progress on Wave Energy Marine Buoys

TLDR

Wave energy technologies have evolved over recent decades but have not converged, offering a promising way to capture ocean wave energy to address the power bottleneck in marine distributed systems such as buoys. The study introduces recent research, development, and application of wave energy marine buoys and discusses their applicability to typical marine buoys. The paper enumerates recent developments in wave energy capture, such as oscillating bodies, and power‑take‑off technologies, like nanogenerators, and discusses their applicability to marine buoys. The study concludes that wave energy technologies can serve as a critical addition to marine distributed systems’ power solutions and that wave energy buoys will likely split into converter and powered types, distinguished by the ratio of generated to load power.

Abstract

This study aims to introduce and discuss the recent research, development and application of wave energy marine buoys. The topic becomes increasingly appealing after the observation that wave energy technologies have been evolving in the recent decades, yet have not reached convergence. The power supply is usually the bottleneck for marine distributed systems such as buoys. Wave energy technologies are especially useful in this sense, as they can capture and convert the promising “native” renewable energy in the ocean (i.e., wave energy) into electricity. The paper enumerates the recent developments in wave energy capture (e.g., oscillating bodies) and power take-off (e.g., nanogenerators). The study also introduces the typical marine buoys and discusses the applicability of wave energy technologies on them. It is concluded that the wave energy technologies could be implemented as a critical addition to the comprehensive power solution of marine distributed systems. Wave energy buoys are likely to differentiate into “wave energy converter buoys” and “wave-energy-powered buoys”, which is indicated by the ratio of the generated power to the load power.