Millions of people each year face natural coastal disasters, leaving them without water, and electric power. A Wave Energy Converter named Platypus, using only oceanic wave motion can continuously generate enough electrical charge to operate a seawater desalinator that turns saltwater into clean drinking water, or it can provide sufficient power for heating, lighting, or other electrical items needed in emergency situations.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:37

Welcome to Radio Cade. I'm your host James Di Virgilio. Today we'll be visiting with one of our Cade Prize inventors. He's working on something very, very interesting. In fact, he's created many different things I like to welcome to the show Mark Supal, chief technology officer at Engineering Technologies, LLC founded in January of 2019. Mark you're working on something that, to my knowledge, hasn't been done before. Very interesting concept. Tell us about it.

Mark Supal: 1:05

Thank you for the introduction. What the product is, it's called Platypus and we named it Platypus because it has two arms that bounce up and down, kind of like a tail and a bill on a Platypus. And it bounces in ocean waves. Turns generators to produce electricity and the electricity can either be stored in batteries, right at the machine and use there, or it can be routed to the shore via a marine cable. And again, it's for producing and harvesting ocean energy.

James Di Virgilio: 1:29

So is anyone working on or has anyone worked on anything like this before using the ocean waves to produce usable energy?

Mark Supal: 1:37

Many universities and big companies have tried to produce machines that generate megawatts of electrical energy. They're very expensive and they haven't necessarily been successful to sell electricity at a cost that makes sense, or is comparable to like wind or solar energy. What makes this product unique is that it's very small in size. It was designed to be shipped and airdropped into emergency regions that suffer from coastal disasters, like the strike we recently had from hurricane Laura , where people might need water. And to produce this water, you need low scale power. So this machine produces the order of 50 Watts, which can power a decelerator to produce fresh drinking water, but what's interesting is upon investigation. We found many companies that need things other than to sell a nation of water. They need to power all sorts of scientific buoys in the ocean.

James Di Virgilio: 2:25

So if I'm needing to power of buoy , I grabbed this Platypus. I drop it somewhere out in the ocean. I'm assuming it runs on solar power. And then it gives me an injunction with wave power. Is it just wave power? Tell me how I'm getting energy. And then how am I using the energy?

Mark Supal: 2:40

No, it uses strictly the ocean energy. So the waves bounce up and down. And the movement of the wave rotates a generator, which produces the electricity and it's stored in the batteries are used directly at the buoy. So the Platypus can be tethered to the buoy, right to the buoy via c