fairfolio
Saved Projects

Analysis of Optimal Locations for Ocean Wave to Maximize Energy Generation

CSEF · 2017 Environmental Science

Laura Gong · Palos Verdes High School, Palos Verdes Estates, Los Angeles County

Overview

Objectives/Goals Energy making-related emissions from power plants and other traditional fuels cause major respiratory and cardiovascular health risks. Producing reusable, environment-friendly energy such as harnessing energy from ocean waves is necessary. This project#s long term goal is to develop the most efficient way to harness potential energy from ocean waves with the use of point absorber buoys, which produces more usable energy as there are greater wave heights. The first-year goal is to analyze which areas along the coast of California have the largest waves in specific future weeks, thus producing more energy. Methods/Materials Collecting previous wave height data from coasts along the California coast is crucial to predict where and which weeks will have the greatest wave heights. Python 2.7 program is capable of predicting and graphing previous and future wave heights. It is necessary to predict and graph the wind speed in those certain locations to analyze the how wind speeds affect the height of waves. Graphs of the wave heights, wind speed, gust speed and air temperature show the relationship between them to predict which week will have large waves. Results Optimal sites to place point absorbers are in Cape Mendocino, Diablo Canyon, Half Moon Bay, Humboldt Bay, and San Francisco. The second week of December will have the highest waves. Therefore the optimal week to harness energy from ocean waves is during the second week of December. Conclusions/Discussion The data analysis goal was reached as the optimum locations to produce the most energy were found. Most data regarding wind speed and gust speed show that higher waves have speeds greater than average speeds that year. The graphs concerning sea surface temperature greatly differ. Thus, sea surface temperature isn#t a major factor to determine wave heights, but wind speed and gust speed are.

Summary statement

This analysis decides the optimal locations along the coast of California to put point absorbers by finding the relationship of possible factors: wind speed, gust speed, and sea surface temperature - to wave heights.

Help received

Mrs. Julie Munoz provided support throughout the process. I received my data from NOAA National Data Buoy Center. I then ran the data through a Python script I had created on my own

Competition history

  • CSEF 2017 Environmental Science · Entry S1206

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google