NASA engineer invents device to convert seawater to electricity

Original source:
http://www.easternecho.com/cgi-bin/story.cgi?4694

Summary:

• Now, a generation later with a new energy crisis, the son of that rocket scientist thinks he is close to perfecting that spare-part dream: a machine that might make cheap, clean electricity from the ocean.
• The renewed interest in finding cheap, plentiful and renewable energy has rekindled interest in the work of Woodbridge and others.
• He knows about 20 other companies trying to get energy from the sea.
• Alternative energy is in the forefront again as high fuel costs, after Hurricane Katrina, wreak havoc on the nation's oil refineries and Americans' wallets.
• Almost any eighth-grader can tell you that spinning copper wires through a stable magnetic field makes electricity _ lots of electrons jumping off the magnetic field and zooming through a conductive metal.
• But the sea is a very hostile environment," said professor Elias K. "Lee" Stefanakos, director of the University of South Florida's Clean Energy Research Center in Tampa.
• But after tinkering with the idea off and on for years, Tom Woodbridge is making a final push toward making his father's dream a reality.
• He has six U.S. and international patents, a $30,000 grant from the state's Technological Research and Development Authority and prototypes that take up most of the family garage in Satellite Beach.
• His father's idea, to use the rocking motion of the waves to generate electricity, came from looking at his son's Slinky toy back in 1972.
• Woodbridge says he needs about $550,000 for 18 months of development for three ocean-trial models, and he expects it will cost $4.2 million to complete through production.
• Stefanakos says he is glad people are looking for alternatives to fossil fuels such as oil, but he's cautious about getting electricity from the sea.

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