An extended-range wave-powered autonomous underwater vehicle applied to underwater wireless sensor networks

Hai Li; Xiaoping Wu; Zutao Zhang; Xing Tan; Yajia Pan; Chutian Dai; Dabing Luo; Ammar Ahmed; Yongsheng Xu

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104738

An extended-range wave-powered autonomous underwater vehicle applied to underwater wireless sensor networks

iScience. 2022 Jul 9;25(8):104738. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104738. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.

Authors

Hai Li^{1

2}, Xiaoping Wu¹, Zutao Zhang¹, Xing Tan^{1

2}, Yajia Pan¹, Chutian Dai^{1

2}, Dabing Luo¹, Ammar Ahmed³, Yongsheng Xu⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, P. R. China.
² Yibin Research Institute, Southwest Jiaotong University, Yibin 644000, P.R. China.
³ School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, PR China.
⁴ School of Design and Art, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, P. R. China.

Abstract

The autonomous underwater vehicle has widespread applications in marine resource exploration, seabed search and rescue, underwater military reconnaissance, and marine environmental monitoring. Owing to the limited battery capacity, autonomous underwater vehicles usually only operate for several hours or days at a time. This article presents an extended-range wave-powered autonomous underwater vehicle (WPAUV) for underwater wireless sensor networks. Through theoretical analysis, simulation, dry and field experiments, the power generation performance of the extended-range WPAUV was evaluated. Under different wave amplitudes and wave frequencies, the mechanical efficiency of the extended-range WPAUV ranges from 20.41% to 81.56%. The average efficiency is 45.35%. In the field experiments, under calm ocean conditions, the maximum instantaneous power can reach 67.74W with an average of 10.18W. This high performance manifests that the extended-range WPAUV can effectively scavenge wave energy and converts it into electrical energy for expanding the cruising mileage.

Keywords: applied sciences; engineering; wireless sensor network.