Recent progress on ducks

Until the end of 1978, the team at Edinburgh put most of its effort into small-scale laboratory tests with increasing levels of hydrodynamic realism. Some test results show that the requirement for rigidity of the duck backbone is much lower than was predicted, and that in waves with lengths of twenty diameters and more, there are considerable benefits to be derived from controlled backbone movements. Since the beginning of 1979, we have been working on the problems of full-scale design. The CEGB-preferred schemes use low-pressure air turbines, asynchronous generation, d.c. transmission, serial connections and simple designs with reliability achieved by easy access and maintenance. We prefer high-pressure oil hydraulics, synchronous generation, a.c. transmission and parallel connections. We exploit the techniques of modern electronics and plan to achieve reliability by total hermetic sealing of the power conversion mechanism which will exclude all organisms, both marine and human. I shall attempt to justify our approach.