Chapter 12-Ocean_s_renewable_power_and_review_of_technologies_case_study_waves.pdf

Chapter 12 Oceans Renewable Power and Review of Technologies: Case Study Waves Ehsan Enferad and Daryoush Nazarpour Additional information is available at the end of the chapter /10.5772/53806 1. Introduction In last decades, in effect of high price of fossil fuel, environmental pollution due to fossil fuel utilization and greenhouse effect, renewable energy resources are considered as an alterna‐ tive energy resource to the World’s excessive energy demand. Nowadays, different technol‐ ogies are utilized to energy generation from hydro power, fuel cell and hydrogen, biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic and wind, while the technology for converting ocean powers are still in infancy. The aim of this chapter is to introduce potential renewable power sources of ocean, mostly ocean wave power, as well as available technologies for ex‐ tracting wave power. Due to high energy amount available in ocean, the issue has a strong importance to investigate. Furthermore there are variety of technologies that are developed for harnessing wave power each of which has an individual mechanism. Harvesting ocean wave power and converting to electrical power is a challenge for marine, mechanical, elec‐ trical and control engineers and we hope to give essential information about ocean wave, methods of energy extracting from wave and related electrical equipment. 1.1. Ocean The oceans contain 97.2% of total world water which are covering 71% of Earth’s surface [1]. Also the oceans intrinsically are couple with atmosphere via air-water interface and they ex‐ change heat, moisture, momentum and trace constituents by means of air-water interface [2]. The fundamental processes that transfer energy from atmosphere to ocean are energy in‐ put to ocean by wind and net surface heat flux [3]. Furthermore, ocean absorbs heat of geo‐ thermal energy via geothermal vent in ocean bed. So that, oceans are vigorous and ubiquitous sources of renewable energy which contain 93100 TWh of energy a