Enhancement of Power Generation by Capacitive Mixing

This paper is about harnessing blue energy, or salinity gradient power through capacitive mixing and enhancing it by using converters in order to fully utilize the energy obtained from the sea. An experimental setup was done by immersing electrodes of different materials, specifically aluminium and carbon as electrodes into salt water and measuring the obtained voltage and current from the experimental setup. Then, boost and buck converters were designed and simulated in LTSpice in order to determine the most suitable DC-DC converters to be used for this project. The highest obtainable output power from the experiment was 89.7mW. For the simulations, the simulated boost converter was able to boost supply voltage of 1V to 1.61V (theoretical value is 2V) with output current of 160.5mA (load = 10 ohm) and the simulated buck converter was able to step-down supply voltage of 1V to 0.347V (theoretical value is 0.5V) with output current of 34.71mA (load = 10 ohm). By implementing the circuit on PCB, the output voltage obtained was 1.54V with efficiency of 61.54% when compared to the simulated output voltage. The output power per square centimeter was also calculated to be 0.664mW / cm. The experimental setup can be optimized by using different configurations of placement for the electrodes in order to increase the surface area of the carbon to increase the current obtained. Besides that, several cells can be produced and connected in series to obtain higher voltage or connected in parallel for higher current for many other different purposes.