Design and Analysis of a Novel Lightweight Translator Permanent Magnet Linear Generator for Oceanic Wave Energy Conversion

At present, most of the linear generators contain a heavy translator for converting wave power from the ocean into electrical power. As the translator is connected to the buoy, the buoy dynamic performance is reduced by the large mass and, as a result, low velocity of the translator would degrade the electricity generation of the linear generator. This problem has been minimized by the new design in this paper, where the translator is clipped off at first and split into two separate portions to minimize its weight. The secondary stator is magnetically coupled with a special m-shaped main stator which is used to flow the necessary magnetic flux. The weight of the proposed translator is 21.82% lower than that of conventional one and 49.1% by using a recently available permanent magnet with higher specifications. The finite-element method is applied in ANSYS simulation environment for the analysis and comparison between the proposed and conventional designs. Different parameters of the conventional and the proposed linear generator have been discussed in this paper. The simulation results show that the proposed design can generate the same amount of electricity as the existing one with almost half of the translator size. According to the mathematical model, it is understood that the dynamics of the translator would be higher for its lower mass and vice versa. Therefore, minimizing the translator size would result in decrease of mass, which increases the dynamics of the buoy connected to the translator.