Deep Gen: A deep water hydro generator for moorings

The Deep Gen project aims at defining a generator that powers the typical mooring of instruments used for data acquisition purpose in both the deep and the shallow water environment. The generator itself is named Deep Gen. The Deep Gen exploits the marine currents to produce electrical power. Thus, instead of using only a fixed energy storage (batteries) to power the underwater instruments, here the idea is to produce “in loco” the required energy. Because the output power of the generator depends on the cubic of the velocity of the marine currents, the system can change its working underwater depth, to find the optimal layer to stay in the water column. The Deep Gen is equipped with a logic that, on the basis of various information, as the speed of the currents stemming from the Current Profilers, the need of energy of the instruments, the state of charge of the batteries, the loss of energy for changing the depth, decides the best strategy to implement. The goal is obviously to increase the operating time of the mooring, with absolute priority to guarantee the operation of the modem transmitter and the releaser of the mooring. The present work is under development and we present here the general approach and the preliminary results of the simulations made mainly using Matlab. A first prototype will be built shortly and it will be tested in the Ligurian Sea.