M. Abbaspour - Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology
H. Sarlak - MSc graduate of Mechanical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology

The important characteristic of sea waves is their high energy density, which is the highest among renewable energy sources. Having up to 2700 km. of shoreline, Iran has a great potential in construction of wave energy power plants (WEP). In this article a novel WEP is introduced. The system can be exposed to regular and irregular waves which are generated using wave maker. It can extract the wave energy from vertical oscillation of its floating buoy. The device also is designed to operate in rotational mode in addition to vertical (heave) motion.Numerical simulations are performed to obtain the hydrodynamic coefficients of different floating buoys as well as dynamic response (transfer function) of each buoy in waves. Experiments are also designed to demonstrate system performance. The experiments are carried out in marine engineering research center (MERC) at school of mechanical engineering, Sharif University of Technology. Experimental results in different conditions are presented and the effect of different buoy configurations on the system efficiency is studied. It is shown that experiments validate the simulation results. In other words, the buoy which has the highest transfer function in numerical simulations has the greatest efficiency among other buoy shapes. The scale effects are established and the output power of a full scale WEP is obtained based on similarity laws

Ocean wave energy, Power plant, Floating buoy, Numerical and experimental design