For my undergraduate capstone project I worked with a team of mechanical engineering students to design and prototype a device to convert the kinetic energy from ocean waves into usable electrical energy. Wave energy is a high density, clean source of energy that is readily available to many near shore and off shore locations around the world. Effectively harnessing the vast amounts of energy available in ocean wave can help to meet the energy demands for a large segment of the worlds populations. Our design utilized a mechanism mounted on a buoy which converted linear motion of the buoy due to ocean waves into rotation motion that rotated the shaft of an alternator to generate electricity. A functional prototype of our design was built and tested for the project.

Our project was awarded the 2006 Stevens Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Award.