- Title: Wave test platform creating ripples
- Date: 18th May 2016
- Summary: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK (MAY 3, 2016) (REUTERS) PROFESSOR DAVID INGRAM, OF UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, TALKING TO A COLLEAGUE (SOUNDBITE) (English) PROFESSOR DAVID INGRAM, OF UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, SAYING: "Testing in the tank here, learning all those lessons; that can be done very quickly. And it's a very exhaustive test campaign that here will cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds. That sounds like a lot of money, but that test will save millions of pounds in the sea. In a test tank like this you get the bad wave conditions, you get storms, when you want them. If you don't want them they don't happen. If you take your machine out to sea and you want to test it under storm conditions you might have to wait 20 years for the bad storm that you wanted."
- Embargoed: 2nd June 2016 16:11
- Keywords: renewables tidal power energy FloWave University of Edinburgh
- Location: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK
- City: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK
- Country: United Kingdom
- Topics: Science
- Reuters ID: LVA0024IC60KB
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: A unique wave replication facility in Scotland is helping creators of large energy devices test them in various weather conditions, at a lower cost and more efficiently than at sea, according to its developers.
Opened in 2014, the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility is a 25-metre circular pool that recreates waves and currents from coastlines around the world.
It's designed to test energy devices, such as wave and tidal energy converters and floating offshore wind platforms at model scale, at a fraction of the cost of conducting full-scale research at sea.
FloWave can simulate scale equivalents of waves up to 28 metres high and currents comparable to 14 knots in the two-metre deep tank, which uses 2.4 million litres of water.
David Ingram is a founding Director of FloWave TT Ltd and Professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the University of Edinburgh, on whose campus the facility is based. Ingram says FloWave will allow companies to test their offshore floating platforms cheaply, with an absolute guarantee of appropriate weather conditions at all times.
He told Reuters: "A very exhaustive test campaign here will cost you hundreds of thousands of pounds. That sounds like a lot of money, but that test will save millions of pounds in the sea. In a test tank like this you get the bad wave conditions, you get storms, when you want them. If you don't want them they don't happen. If you take your machine out to sea and you want to test it under storm conditions you might have to wait 20 years for the bad storm that you wanted."
He added: "We're helping the industry build out, we're helping people design better, safer, more secure, more easily installable, more easily maintainable, more easily removable platforms for all sorts of different things in the hope that in 20 years' time you will actually see these things a lot more than you do now."
According to Stuart Brown, FloWave's CEO, "it's a 25 metre diameter, circular, test tank ringed with wave makers all the way round the outside and with these wave makers we can make waves in any direction, any time, any frequency, amplitude in the tank replicating the ocean. But we can also push the water in the tank around using a current generation system and that enables us to replicate both current and waves in a very complex way that accurately represents the ocean."
Brown told Reuters that FloWave is superior to other testing platforms. "Previously, the normal test tanks that came before this typically were like a swimming pool," he said. "They were rectangular and they would put wave makers at one end, the short end of the pool, and they could push waves down the tank in one direction. Because the test tank here is circular we can put wave makers in any direction, including in two directions at once."
The innovative system harnesses wave, wind and tidal power to generate renewable energy. Ingram says such energy can be used to power activities such as fish farming or desalinating water for drinking.
Ingram has been testing a European Commission funded project called TROPOS, which aims to build a prototype floating, multi-use, platform system for use in deep waters. The idea is to combine several sustainable technologies in one location.
He said: "You can conceive of something that brought together transport and aquaculture and energy generation, so you have a floating energy platform in the sea. They're quite big to support the wind turbines or the tidal systems or the wave machines that you're using to generate energy and then on that floating platform around that you either have the crew service accommodation for the fish farmers, you might have big fish cages supported from that platform. We also looked at a special sort of floating raft that grows phytoplankton for turning into oil and biofuels."
One prototype wind turbine platform, which included an attached fish cage, has been tested recently at FloWave. Ingram thinks such devices will become increasingly common as their cost goes down.
"We've been talking to people in Taiwan and in Chile about doing exactly this where they don't have easy access to grid electricity to do work for the fish farm; and diesel's expensive and if there's a diesel spill it's environmentally dangerous, and a wave power solution or a floating wind solution could get them away from that," said Ingram.
He believes such multi-use solutions could also bring work and prosperity to beleaguered coastal communities, including fishermen.
The 10.5 million pounds ($15 million USD) FloWave facility was funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the University of Edinburgh, and Scottish Enterprise. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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