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| Wed, 8th Sep 2021 13:54:00 |
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Contest Challenges Inventors to Harness Wave Power to Desalinate Seawater |
The struggle to build what might become the next big thing in renewable energy started in a Colorado garage. The designers had gathered about $100 worth of rubber, tubing and valves for a wave energy experiment.
They used the materials to build a small, inflatable pump in 2017. Then they tied it to the bottom of a shallow body of water so it would bob underneath the surface. The pressure from waves moving above it would momentarily push in the pump’s flexible diaphragm.
That compressed air inside the pump and shoved water into a tube. As the springy diaphragm recovered its old shape — getting ready for the next wave — a system of one-way valves kept the water in the tube moving.
“I’ve always been tinkering,” explained Dale Jenne, a mechanical engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He started working with light, flexible materials as a teenager by repairing the fiberglass bodies of early Chevrolet Corvettes.
His work on the sports cars came to mind years later when Jenne was called to assist other NREL researchers working on a new version of an old idea. They were trying to convert the massive amounts of energy in ocean waves “into some meaningful form or work,” Jenne explained in an interview.
Many companies had tried, but their projects to extract wave power — some costing millions of dollars — had mostly fizzled. By 2015, tapping energy from the sun and wind had become big businesses, but harnessing wave energy was still a dream.
Most early devices were built with steel. They were often like war tanks, designed to survive the pounding and corrosion of ocean waves. So the idea that you might extract wave power with lightweight, inexpensive materials was radical.
The result was that Jenne and his fellow inventor, Yi-Hsiang Yu, another NREL researcher, decided to build the first version with their own money in Jenne’s garage.
"It wasn’t just a completely crazy idea. We wanted to understand the right way to do it,” Jenne explained.
The pump worked. And the idea of getting energy from a lightweight, wave-powered device has since blossomed into one of the Department of Energy’s major contests.
It's called “Waves to Water,” and the goal is to harness enough wave energy to desalinate seawater.
Read original full article
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