Design and Numerical Study of a 2-DoF Mechanism for Efficient Wave Energy Extraction in Onshore Application

The electricity generation from wave energy represents an important step towards meeting renewable energy targets. The challenge of efficiently capturing the wave power is still an open topic for academies, scientific communities and companies’ commercial competitiveness. This paper presents a study on the design and numerical simulation of a two degrees of freedom mechanism able to maximize the mechanical energy transformation in onshore application. The effects of the geometric parameters, leverage lengths, heavy-buoy and paddles shapes, relative position between hinges, auxiliary masses position for semi-submerged conditions were systematically studied. The numerical results demonstrated that the resulting configuration setting is significantly influenced by hydrodynamic input performance, nevertheless the proposed device is able to guarantee a stable performance and it has an efficiency that could reach up to 64.9%.