The energy research is part of a National Science Foundation-funded research project to create the world's first free-floating, fully submerged wave energy converter that generates electrical power from deep ocean waves.

The successful experiment was the first demonstration of the efficiency of cyclodial wave energy conversion, a major step toward real-life application of this technology, said Dr. Stefan Siegel, who is leading the research effort at the Air Force Academy.

The Academy's Department of Aeronautics began this project in the fall of 2008. The Aeronautics department professors have decades of experience researching feedback flow control and fluid dynamics for various military aircraft and NASA spacecraft, which is the rare and necessary expertise to create a successful wave energy converter.

The latest tests are experimental confirmation of the computational simulations which began the project. "We had actually better than 99 percent wave cancellation and efficiency in those simulations," said Doctor Siegel.

"Now, everybody looks at simulations and says 'well you're making all those assumptions and deriving the equations.' The short of it is nobody believes simulations other than the guy who did it. So what we did over the last year here at the Academy is we set up a very small, about 1:300 scale version of the deep ocean wave in the lab, we built a wave tank, and we built a scale model of our wave energy converter that we will use in the open ocean.

"What came out of those initial experiments is that we were able to get 95 percent of the wave's energy. That is in a sense confirming and replicating the results that we got out of the simulations," he said.

That remaining five percent was lost to harmonic waves. But improved feedback flow control increased the efficiency to 99 percent in subsequent tests.

"There's pretty good reason to believe that when we scale up the experiment, it will behave in a similar fashion."

The computational research and physical research were both performed at the Air Force Academy. In many research environments, one of these two options is available, but rarely do researchers have both available. But both are available at the Air Force Academy, and are literally in the same building.

"This is really one of the great benefits of working in this environment, here where we have both outstanding computational support and the lab has excellent experimental facilities. In this case we had to build the wave tank from scratch, but we have the lab infrastructure that supports that," he said.

"We have the ability to do both here, that allows us to get more confidence in our results," he said.

But Siegel is not the first to try to conquer the engineering difficulties of harnessing energy from ocean waves. To date, two things have prevented this technology from being successful: survivability and efficiency.

"There's a very wide range of approaches people have taking in trying to get energy out of ocean waves. They all boil down to two issues: You can say that nothing has survived in the open ocean for more than six months at a time; and second, whatever we put out there right now is not efficient," he said.

"So why would we care about efficiency in the end? Efficiency in generating electricity boils down to what the consumer has to pay for their electric bill at the end of the month," added Doctor Siegel.

"So for ocean wave energy, it's fair to say that it's not competitive right now with other forms of renewable energy sources, and at the same time, the devices we put out in the ocean get destroyed by the next best storm. So those are the two issues we're trying to address."

The converter's survivability has been addressed through several adaptations, the largest of which comes from designing the converter to be part of a free-floating submerged platform. This places the converter away from the surface hazards created by major storms on the ocean's surface, which have been the demise of others organizations' attempts to demonstrate wave energy converter technology.

Cadet involvement is an integral part of obtaining and collecting these results for this project, which furthers cadet education and academic research. For Academy cadets majoring in Aeronautical Engineering, research is a requirement, and every semester has Aero majors working side-by-side with professors on research and data collection. One of those cadets recently introduced to this is Cadet 1st Class Caitlin Miller, who was one of several cadets who joined the wave energy project last year.

"Last semester, we pretty much worked in parallel with researchers, providing experimental results to validate the computational simulations they'd done," said Cadet Miller.

"It was a lot cooler than I expected," she said. "I thought it was especially interesting, because renewable energy is one of the big things people are looking at, especially considering the finite supply of natural resources. The potential wave energy has to become the next big renewable energy source is a pretty cool thing to be part of."

She will further her research into wave energy this semester, as part of an independent study course.

The current three-year NSF grant runs through September 2011, and another federal agency is providing $400,000 of follow-on funding to literally take the wave energy converter to the next level.

"What we have in place right now is a grant from the Department of Energy and they are funding us to do larger scale testing. It's for an 18-month timeframe, basically looking at two testing campaigns at the Offshore Technology Research Center at Texas A and M," he said. The center has one of the world's largest wave tank facilities, which will allow the test of a larger wave energy converter, and eventually permit testing of three wave energy converters simultaneously.

"It allows us to take this one step further. Currently, we have a 1:300 scale experiment in our lab. The next phase is to do a 1:10 scale test."

The funding will also allow the wave energy converter to the next Technology Readiness Level.

Technology Readiness Level is a scale of one to nine utilized by federal government and much of industry to determine a potential invention's testing and readiness, ranging from the conceptual to a proven product.

A Technology Readiness Level of one signifies a technology which has gone from scientific research to applied research, while a Technology Readiness Level of nine designates a technology for a mission-ready product that is fully ready for full-size, full-scale use.

The wave energy converter is currently at a Technology Readiness Level of three, and the DOE funding will take the converter to a Technology Readiness Level of four.

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