Abstract

As populations grow across the world, the availability of freshwater at a reasonable cost has become a growing concern to many nations. An estimated 1.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water [5]. Many of these areas also exist in coastal communities which get burdened by severe weather storms. During these occasions, access to clean drinking water drastically decreases. Combining this with the potential for ocean energy, access to clean drinking water can be derived with a potential solution. The ocean contains abundant resources that comprise of untapped wave-powered energy, unharvested salt water to be turned potable, and even lithium deposits embedded in said salt water. Utilization of ocean resources may help solve the vast issues of water scarcity. Hammerhead Desalination utilized resources on Wave Energy Converters (WEC) and desalination methods to optimize the pursue a novel method to produce clean water for disaster recovery for coastal communities. The goal of this project was to design a WEC that can capture marine energy and directly create pressure to push sea water through an RO membrane to create drinking water. This team aimed to create a method that avoids the inefficiencies of generating electricity by just powering a pump. In this report, there are three main sections, the Business Plan, Technical Design, and Build and Test. The Business Plan will go into detail about the current market and how this design is projected to perform. It will cover stakeholders, competitors, and potential risks. The Technical Design will investigate the functionalities of the full-scale model. Background information, research, CAD models, and structural analysis are covered in this section. And lastly, the Build and Test section will describe the functions that were tested and explain the results which support modeling efforts. With a lack of waves mirroring those found off the shore of coastal communities, the team modeled the force, amplitude, and period of ocean waves through a motor being controlled by a Variable Frequency Drive (VFD). The experiment showed the design could reach pressure capable of desalinating water. Overall, these results were extremely encouraging and validating of the full-scale model’s design.

Comments

This report is from the Marine Energy Collegiate Competition 2023.

Date of this Version

2023

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