Live marine muscle

The US non-profit research company SRI International is testing a buoy-mounted, wave-powered generator in the ocean near Santa Cruz, California.

The wave-powered generator uses SRI's Electroactive Polymer Artificial Muscle (EPAM), a rubbery material that can generate electricity by simply being stretched and allowed to return to its original shape.

This 'artificial muscle' can generate electricity directly from the motion of waves, with no need for complicated and costly hydraulic transmissions, typically found in other wave-power generators.

In 2004, the technology was licensed exclusively to Artificial Muscle, an SRI spin-off company.

A Japanese company, Hyper Drive, has licensed the technology for wave-power generator applications from Artificial Muscle, and is sponsoring the testing of the device.

An earlier version of the generator was deployed in August 2007 in Tampa Bay, Florida.

The Tampa Bay experiment used a generator design that was intended to show how the EPAM technology could supply electricity to existing buoys, such as navigation buoys, and eliminate the need to replace large numbers of costly batteries.