Development of a mechanical device to harvest energy from marine waves

One of the most promising renewable energy sources is the seas and oceans waves’ motion. The main issue to harvest energy from waves is to transform the motion (oscil-lating motion) into a rotating motion, in order to be able to put the electricity generator in rotation. In the last years several devices have been developed to harvest energy form the seas, in general they focus the attention on the way to get energy from waves using different types of floater and ways to fix it. However, the transformation of floater mo-tion in kinetic energy suitable for energy generation is obtained by “standard” systems not designed ad-hoc; the most of them consist in hydraulic systems, which show many issues, among the others, complexity and the risk of marine pollution because of the presence of oil. In this work, a novel mechanism allowing the transformation of wave motion (alterna-tive motion) into unidirectional rotating motion is presented. The mechanism faces the following issues: direct transformation of wave’s motion in rotating unidirectional mo-tion, absence of oil lubricant, higher efficiency (compared to already used systems), reliability.