by
Rong-Juin Shyu
National Taiwan Ocean University
R.O.C.
The potential thermal resource in the ocean can be extracted by using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) power plant. The countries locate near tropical area have the biggest advantage of tapping into such huge amount of energy resource. Taiwan, being one of such countries, has been supporting a series of feasibility study of constructing a five megawatts land-based OTEC plant in eastern part of Taiwan.
Same as other OTEC designs, the cold water pipe for this power plant poses great challenges to the current status of technology. This paper discuss several potential cold water pipe design concepts for this particular site. The candidate materials for the cold water pipe are polyethylene and sandwiched fiber reinforced plastic. As for deployment, in the near shore section, the pipes are proposed to be trenched and buried. As for deep water section, inverse coronary configuration are proposed to avoid difficulties in deep water construction.