Development of a miniature, low-cost wave measurement solution

Commercial wave buoys, while accurate and reliable, utilize high specification components which can render the cost of deployment and maintenance prohibitively high for many applications. This paper describes the deployment of Tyndall Wireless Inertial Measurement Units (WIMUs) as applied to measurement of ocean waves. These inertial measurement units are miniature devices which combine a microcontroller, wireless communication capability, and solidstate MEMS sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer) with specialized algorithms for specific analytical tasks. The deployments include testing on a laboratory based rig and in an artificial wave tank. Sea state parameters are extracted from the inertial data using a zero-crossing method, incorporating two different methodologies with the results of each compared. Height measurement accuracy is shown to be significantly improved over previous studies in this field, with average wave height (H_av) error of less than 1% ±7%.