Bending moments of short spines

Abstract

The Lanchester Polytechnic's 'Clam' wave energy device consists of a series of flexible air bags driving self-rectifying turbo-generators, mounted on an unjointed spine. The device is designed to be moored at about 35 degrees to approaching wave fronts because it relies on phase differences between the air bags to produce power. At Edinburgh University's Wave Power Project, we have been studying 'ducks' - hydraulic devices with gyroscope inertial reference. These are also mounted on a spine, but in our case, the spine is several kilometers long, with joints of controllable stiffness and damping. In order to model the Lanchester spine, we took 4 spine sections of our model, with an overall length of 1.6m and diameter of 125 mm, and deemed the scale to be 1:50. This corresponds therefore to a full scale spine of length 80m and diameter 6.25m.