'Robot muscle' turns wave power into electricity
Wave-powered electroactive polymer artificial muscle (EPAM) generator. Photo: USF SRI Buoy CRob Harris
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In 2007, researchers completed the first tests of a system that uses a type of “artificial muscle” to generate power from the motion of ocean waves.
The system is based on a rubbery material coated with conductive goo that was originally developed as an artificial muscle for robots. The artificial muscle stretches or shrinks when a voltage is applied to it. But the process works backwards, too. That is, when the muscle material is stretched by an outside force, such as ocean waves, it can generate electricity. We spoke with Roy Kornbluh, an engineer at SRI International in California. He helped design the system with Hyper Drive Corporation of Japan.
Roy Kornbluh: It’s a very obvious fit, if you will, to use wave energy to stretch and contract the material, since waves are naturally up and down phenomena.
Kornbluh and his team attached small amounts of the rubbery robot muscle to ocean buoys, and so far have generated enough wattage to power a light bulb. Kornbluh hopes to create whole farms of buoys to produce power for coastal and island communities.
Kornbluh believes that – alongside sunlight and wind – ocean waves could be harnessed in the next decade as a source of cheap, clean energy.
Harvesting power from the ocean an article about Roy Kornbluh’s work from Technology Review.
Our thanks to:
Dr. Roy Kornbluh
Senior Research Engineer
SRI International
Menlo Park, CA
So now we have the 1325th different design for a wave machine.
And 1322 of them produce rather useless non-dispatchable power.
The alternative energy field needs to produce dispatchable generators, like the Seadog or CDot or mussle wave machines. Govt subsidies have simply got to be less braindead in doling out monies for technologies like wind and photovoltaic that are rapidly becoming obsolete becasue tof their wasteful primitive technology, which requires duplicate power generators whose
output CAN be controlled. Solar thermal and dispatchable wave and nuclear and geothermal all need subsidies. Wind and photovoltaic need to be tossed into the trash can as bad ideas and even worse technology. Unfortuanely the alternative energy mantra is that “we need lots of different technologies…”. Wrong. We need economically sound and practical technologies. Most of what we have now is pure crap that no utility would willingly accept.
Maybe there’s a lot of fits and starts, bad ideas and such being tossed about, but I don’t think you can count out solar energy. All power on this planet came, in one form or another, from the sun. Finding a way to harness that source is the answer to all power questions.
Yes.I think “robot muscle” can’t generate enough energy for all the human beings.We should keep focusing on the other tybes of energy,especially that from the sun.Photovoltaic，I think,is a very important way .