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Catching waves for clean energy
VATIS UPDATE Part
Article body
A team of engineers called CalWave, working closely with UC Berkeley’s Theoretical and Ap-plied Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the United States, has developed a “wave carpet” invented by professor Reza Alam. It looks like an underwater boardwalk that undulates inside a wave tank.
The carpet sits atop a series of double-acting piston pumps. CalWave project lead Marcus Lehmann ex-plained that when “the waves run over the carpet, the carpet adopts the wave motion,” which in turn runs the pumps. They generate hydraulic pressure that gets sent into a discharge pipe, which brings the pressure onshore to convert it into electricity.