Generating power from flowing water is nothing new, but Alternative Energy start-up Energyminer is has developed an innovative way to harness energy from water flow, without dams or weirs that interfere with nature and require massive infrastructure builds.
The Energyfish is a new type of power generation system that works in perfect harmony with nature. This pioneering and particularly sustainable energy source uses the power of water and produces electricity from water flows in rivers, 24 hours a day.
The innovative floating current power plant is able to supply entire communities with energy. What’s special about it is that the energy source is almost completely underwater and is barely visible.
24/7 Clean Power Generation Without Infrastructure Requirement
The floating current power plant works completely silently and has been designed in such a way that it poses no danger to fish. In contrast to wind power or photovoltaics, the Energyfish is capable of base load and therefore produces electricity reliably in all weather conditions and at all times of the year.
This means 100 percent clean energy 24 hours a day, local power generation all year round.
The Energyfish is 100 percent flood-resistant – it can submerge and continue producing. The Energyfish is also low-maintenance and designed for maximum availability.
Hydropower is one of the primary sources of renewable energy at work today, producing over 60% of all sustainable energy, but its deployment comes with some limitations. Building weirs and dams is expensive, resource-intensive and can have negative environmental consequences.
In Africa several major Hydro power plants have also been negatively affected by low rainfall and drought as these major water turbines require large water flows to operate.
But many of us live and work close to moving bodies of water, be they rivers or man-made canal networks – so what if removable and replaceable energy generators could be deployed in such locations, acting as convenient sources of electricity?
Advanced Design Ground Breaking
Energyminer’s founders, Dr Richard Eckl and Dr Georg Walder, set a goal of creating a hydro-generator with a focus on versatility of placement and use in more water flow regions than that of traditional approaches.
The concept created was to build an energy ‘fish’ – a small water flow generator, that could be anchored in a smaller stretch of waterway in numbers, where ‘schools’ of up to 100 fish could be simultaneously deployed. Each unit is small enough that it doesn’t take up much space in the water channel or river, thereby reducing environmental impact.
Design considerations included size and average depth of water flows as well as impact on marine life and directional channels to optimise the water flow through the generator.
Key to their initial research was an academic study that looked at how best to fully utilise hydrokinetic energy in river sections. Niebuhr suggests that much of the time, links between academia and industry aren’t used to good effect, but Energyminer sourced the latest knowledge available, bringing new findings into its concept design process to create the most efficient design.
As a result, the design package for the Energyfish was limited to the size of a small car, allowing it to be transported on a normal truck, reducing installation demands and limiting environmental impact. “You never want to use up a lot of the cross-section of the river, so we always want to use only the first metre depth. And that’s why the Energyfish is shaped and built the way it is,” says Niebuhr.
Optimising Water Flow
Energyminer chief technology officer Chantel Niebuhr is a hydraulics and fluid mechanics specialist that has been with the team since early development stage. She emphasises that the form of the Energyfish is governed by basic hydrodynamic principles; these include considerations such as increasing the pressure over or around the blades to adjust buoyancy and achieving optimum flow velocity in slower river sections.
“Water flow is not something that’s so simple to analyse,” says Niebuhr, “and it gets very complicated, especially when you have rotating components.”
The first step to optimising the flow was to build an initial prototype, building a 3D model in Onshape, before the team got more hands-on, producing a working proof of concept that shows Energyminer’s hardware components working together with other electromechanical components within the structure.
Further Data Driven Advances expected
With that first success under its belt, the process of optimising the design began. For this, Energyminer’s team turned to SimScale’s cloud-based CFD tools.
Using a digital twin of the Energyfish, the team greatly reduced the need for live laboratory testing, and could compare a wide range of scenarios from different German rivers and canals, at different times of year. With physical testing, this would have been almost impossible.
The team’s latest prototype has been operating for over a year in a river flowing through central Munich, sending power to the grid via its low-voltage connection to a land box and validating much of the company’s simulation data at the same time.
Production is already underway and next steps involve installing a school of Energyfish in Germany, allowing Energyminer to test how a group works together in a typical river. With over 4,000 rivers in Germany alone, it is hoped that these swimming generators of clean energy will soon produce greener hydropower while allowing nature to remain unspoilt.
