Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Fall 2022

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

CEPS

Department

Ocean Engineering

Program or Major

Mechanical Engineering

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science

First Advisor

Martin Wosnik

Second Advisor

Erin Bell

Third Advisor

Rob Swift

Abstract

Part of the Marine Energy Collegiate Competition (MECC) is the optional Build and Test Challenge where teams are encouraged to build a portion of their proposed solution. After the conducted testing the laboratory results are compared to the simulated and calculated models. For the MECC the University of New Hampshire (UNH) team decided to use a wave energy converter to produce pressurized water. The pressurized water would be filtered through a reverse osmosis membrane to make it potable. Our system uses the power of the ocean waves to move a float up and down in heave motion. This motion drives a piston in a piston chamber. The piston and piston chamber are two separate buoys that work together to create the pressurized water. The relative motion between the piston float and the piston chamber float creates pressurized water for the reverse osmosis membrane. Our team decided to reproduce our system at a 1/8 scale and test it in the UNH wave tank in the Jere A. Chase Ocean Engineering Lab. The UNH wave tank can produce waves at specific periods and wave heights which allows testing of the device at scaled down wave heights and periods using Froude scaling.

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