Wave Power

Seas and oceans are one of the most powerful sources of renewable energy, both in the form of waves and underwater currents.

The current global effort to develop tangible and competitive technologies for the production of electrical energy using wave power aims at moving towards a sustainable development. The achievement of a society with low carbon emission is the final goal.

Just to give an idea of the huge potential of this kind of resource think about the fact that, considering an area extended up to 30 nautical miles of the coast, the available resource reaches the quantity of 2 terawatt. This is an impressive number as it represents one third of the whole electrical capacity worldwide, which is equal to 6 terawatt. Given that 40% of the world population lives within 100km from the coast, it is clear how significant this form of energy is.

It is starting from the 1970s that numerous initiatives, both in the private and public sector, brought up a series of machines with the purpose of harvesting wave energy. This made it possible to develop a brand-new industrial sector with high technological characteristics, formed by universities, research institutions and industrial players.

EPF’s aim is to develop an energy generator from wave power combining the present technologies with the market needs, making as well an effort to predict what may be the further development in the field. With more than 50 years of experience in hydraulic, electric and mechanical engineering and the turnkey construction of small hydroelectric plants, at the present EPF’s main business focuses on:

• Planning and implementation of SCADA architecture and advanced monitoring systems in order to maximize the energy recovery potential of various technologies.
• Planning and implementation of test benches for the characterization of electro-mechanical systems.
• Analysis of the hydraulic/hydrodynamic physics of different devices.
• Analysis on the application of hydraulic turbines.
• Prototypes construction.

Among the current projects, EPF collaborates with the Institute for Research on Energy System (RSE SpA). For RSE, EPF has developed the monitoring system and the system for the conversion of mechanical energy collected by the turbine as electrical energy, also named PTO (Power Take Off), from a 1:5 scale model prototype of Wave SAX. The characterization of the performance of its electro-mechanical conversion system required the realization of an in-house dry test bench.

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The talented EPF wave power Team is working hard on many projects to develop wave energy devices.

WaveSax project

EPF collaboration with one of the most important Italian research institute continues in order to bring this concept to reality. Research activities about the Power Take Off (PTO) have been carried out and the system has been fully identified. Now it is time to the design the SCADA architecture and the electric equipment of the next upper-scale device.

MARINET2 – Aalborg University Ocean Basin Access Grant

EPF Wave Energy Conversion technology concept is going to be tested in November 2017 at the Department of Civil Engineering of Aalborg University (Denmark). A scale model is being setup and will be tested in Aalborg 3D-wave and current basin. This is a completely newly built state-of-the-art infrastructure, internationally recognized by the wave power community. These tests will provide the required information for strengthen the knowledge of the system behaviour and will help to validate the design tools already internally developed. This will be a crucial check-point in the development process of the innovative EPF technology.

Wave Energy Scotland - 4th innovation call – Control Systems for Wave Energy

The Wave Energy Scotland (WES) 4th innovation call has been a tough one. Several valuable groups have seen their proposals to fail in the competition. EPF " WEQUAD FRAME project" is one of the WES control systems 13 new projects which aims to develop innovative control systems for the wave power field. The company long term experience as system integrator in industrial automation and its specialist wave power Team are going to work hard to prove the feasibility of their concepts in order to advance to the next demonstration stage of the programme.