The University Of Washington (UW) is supporting US Navy to attain marine renewable energy goal with a $8 million fund, reports UW Today.
It is a four-year contract from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command and NAVFAC to harness tidal energy for the use of Navy’s facilities worldwide.
Energy will be generated from the surrounding water at coastal bases, islands or overseas facilities to lower costs of the power supply.
A partnership with NAVFAC will allow the UW to develop gears for the Navy to tap energy at its various marine locations.
Existing technologies and concepts are advanced to perform well at naval facilities and help reach their energy targets, said, Andrew Stewart, lead investigator, engineer, UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory.
He presented details about the project in Seattle at the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Centre‘s annual meeting on 25th Oct.
The team has designed a three-faced strategy to develop marine energy at naval facilities, which differ from the prime spots now under investigation for commercial marine energy extraction.
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UW mechanical engineering faculty and graduate students have made 3-D printed prototypes of tidal turbines to test in the UW’s water channels.
Next they will build larger-scale models, about 3 feet across, to test in moving water in 2016. The project aims to develop fast, low-cost ways to evaluate the energy potential at prospective sites.
The project also focuses on developing low-cost monitoring technology to make environmental monitoring at naval facilities more straightforward.
Soon, the team will modify the Applied Physics Laboratory’s Henderson research vessel to test small-scale marine energy prototypes.
It’s a pretty big opportunity to work on the optimization problems associated with getting these to work in lower-energy environments, said, Brian Polagye, collaborator, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, UW, who is leading the development of the 3-D prototypes and the environmental monitoring technology.
Jim Thomson, an oceanographer at the Applied Physics Laboratory and associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, is developing wave power devices and low-cost technology to measure the amount of potential wave and tidal energy at various sites.
The U.S. Navy has committed to get half of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2020.
A share of that strategy will be contributed to extract energy from tides, currents and waves.
Sabeena Wahid