Utilizing wave power at anchor - As a complement for marine vessels

Abstract

When not being in service and at anchor, vessels such as M/T Ramona produces greenhouse emissions when powering vital components on the vessel. When a vessel is anchored and waiting for a new order or to enters a port, the auxiliary engines provide the vessel with electrical power. The auxiliary engines run on diesel that costs money, and being a fossil fuel, it contributes to global warming. One solution is to use a wave energy converter attached to the hull to produce zero-emission energy. Several cylindrical buoys are attached to the vessel through an arm and pump a hydraulic oil pressure when the buoy goes up and down. The hydraulic oil pressure accumulates in an accumulator tank and drives the turbine that drives a generator. With the help of SMHI's weather buoys outside Brofjorden, wave amplitude and frequency have been used to calculate how much potential power the wave energy converter can produce. The result can define how vessels at anchor produce energy and new applications for environmentally sustainable transports at sea. This report is based on the specifics of M/T Ramona and the FABWEC system that recently was tested by Yang et al. (2019) as a good candidate for such a system. This article only covers the theoretical side of the test, and no real-life test was conducted. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that enough energy can be converted to supply a vessel the same size as M/T Ramona.