On the use of rotary-linear generators in floating hybrid wind and wave energy conversion systems

Floating offshore wind energy conversion surely will be a significant part of the forthcoming renewable energy market. The future is to move the wind farms farer and farer from the shore, and meanwhile to permanently reduce the cost of deployment, operation and maintenance. There are already numerous promising floating wind energy conversion technologies seeking to address different environmental and engineering challenges, and looking for further investors. Among them there are also approaches using together both the wind and wave resources of a site, because there are a lot of areas on Earth with high combined (wind and wave) energy potentials. The hybrid wind and wave energy converters do not have yet a mature technology; therefore any advancement can be of real interest for all the specialists working in this field. In the paper, an interesting approach is presented, which is based on a common energy converter for the two power resources, based on a rotary-linear generator. The paper contains a short survey on existing floating wind and hybrid energy converters, which led to the idea of the proposed system. The last part of the paper is a detailed review on the possible rotary-linear generators to be used in the proposed renewable energy conversion system.