Design and Modelling of a Portable Pico Linear Generator for Wave Energy Conversion System

Ocean wave energy is continuous, concentrated, predictable and resourceful since two third of the world is covered by the sea compared to the wind energy and solar energy. Therefore the researchers has invented many types of wave energy converters to generate electricity. However, these wave energy converters are mostly huge, fixed at one place, not portable and uses for the large application. Hence, this research will focus on designing and modelling the portable pico linear generator for the wave energy converter application. The linear generator has gained more attention because of the simple design which uses less mechanical part and make it less maintain. The aim for this research is to develop a permanent magnet linear generator which has the weight less than 20 kg and can produce up to 80W. A thorough literature review has been done on type of configurations, stator structure, magnetization and type of cored to select the best features of the linear generator. These selected features then are implemented to the three proposed designs with the same parameters but difference shape of magnet. Three proposed designs of the permanent magnet linear generator is simulated using the Ansys Maxwell software to come up with the preliminary result. After that, all the three designs are optimized with all design parameters to produce the best efficiency. Lastly, the chosen optimize parameters will then again simulated to obtain the optimize result and to compare with the preliminary result. In the discussion and result part, comparison on the preliminary result such as the air gap flux distribution, back-emf, flux linkage and thrust force of the three proposed designs will be shown and discussed. For the optimization part, there are 3 parameters which will be optimized which are Ls/Lr, Tmr/Tp and Rm/Re. The optimization for each parameters will be shown and discussed and compare with the preliminary result. The optimize parameters for each proposed design is used to obtain the result after the optimization and compare with the preliminary result. Throughout this research, we can conclude that, the variation of the magnet shape can yield the different result even using the same material, volume and parameters of the linear generator.