U.S. Department of Energy Marine Energy Collegiate Competition (MECC)

Team Name: Wave Powered Autonomous Boat

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, and Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey

Team deliverables

Vision and mission: Why this competition?

The Marine Energy Collegiate Competition is a fantastic opportunity for our team to showcase what we’ve learned over the past 3 years of school and solve one of the biggest real-world problems. Our team is excited to design and build a product that will potentially help the world transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. We are also eager to put together a business plan and potentially market our product to companies in various marine industries.

Background

Our team’s product is composed of two parts that act together as a single system. The first part is a double-hulled boat that floats on the surface of the ocean, communicates with users on the shore, distributes the harvested power to other electronic components. The second part is a heave plate, which is submerged beneath the surface. Because ocean waves rise and fall on the surface, the boat will have greater motion than the heave plate. A power take-off between the boat and the heave plate will convert this relative motion into usable electricity. Our design is unique in the fact that the heave plate will also serve a secondary purpose by propelling the system without the need for an electricity input.

Strategy

Our team includes undergraduate and graduate students from mechanical engineering, aerospace/ocean engineering, and marketing/business majors, who we have worked to recruit to focus on the marketing strategy. The experience and background knowledge are strong across the team, and each subteam is advised by at least one graduate student who is an expert in the relevant field. We have access to the Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems resources at Virginia Tech, a lab that has designed and built prototypes previously. We benefit from advice and design validation from our project advisor, who is from the center and the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy grant to develop a prototype for an ocean wave energy harvesting device. Under his guidance, we are sure we will be successful in our project endeavors.

Our team plans to prepare and deliver a report on the technical capabilities of our product along with a business plan for future improvements on the design. Due to complications caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are behind on finishing the schedule for the testing phase and have had difficulty reaching out to marine energy companies because of this project’s broad scope and the location of the university. Right now, the team has reached a final design and begun assembling the first prototype.

Social media accounts

Facebook: @VirginiaTech

Instagram: @OceanEnergyClubVT

This portal is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) under Contract Number DE- AC36-08GO28308 with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Contract Number DE-AC05-76RL01830 with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Contract Number DE-NA0003525 with Sandia National Laboratories, as part of the MHK Data Communities project. The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes.

MECC 2022 Wave Powered Autonomous Boat