This is my idea of a cheap and sustainable power plant to be anchored somewhere in the open ocean and exposed to the waves there.
The three satellites form a tripod system which oscillates against the center body as waves travel through the arrangement. The center body is guided passively by the linkage to roll into a position where the piston can freely oscillate within the hydraulic cylinder. This forces are comparatively small.
A pelton or francis turbine placed within the center body (where there is lots of space for all sorts of equipment) will convert the hydraulic pressure into electric energy.
In practice each of the bodies will be fabricated to have a density of 0.5, so that it is half submerged. The mass of the main body should be equivalent to the sum of the masses of the satellite bodies.
To give you some idea about the amount of energy the system can produce with a main body radius of, say, 10 meters:
Unfortunately, it is almost hopeless to produce energy with a printed 3D model of say R = 5cm, at an amplitude of 5cm. My calculation routine (which is part of the code) shows that at a period 1/s the hydraulic energy will be 0.5 Watt, which might not even be enough to press out a little fountain on top of the piston linkage, unless piston, seal and cylinder are fabbed with high precision.
Better scale the thing as a whole. Didn't take much care on parametrizing everything. But I put many comments to guide you through the easy and straight forward code. For faster coding I used my library shortcuts.scad. Sorry for that, but it is so handy ...
centermass.stl | 2.0MB | |
crown.stl | 769.7KB | |
cylinder.stl | 127.1KB | |
hinge.stl | 213.9KB | |
piston.stl | 70.3KB | |
satellite.stl | 2.0MB | |
ShortCuts.scad | 5.8KB | |
wavebuoy.scad | 2.9KB | |
wavebuoy.stl | 11.2MB |