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£1 million granted for offshore energy research projects

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The Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub has awarded almost £1 million to UK universities to support research into aspects of offshore renewable energy.

The Hub was established in July 2018 with £5 million funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and was subsequently awarded a further £4 million in June 2019. It provides research leadership to connect stakeholders, inspire innovation and maximise societal value in offshore renewable energy.

The Hub’s Flexible Fund aims to respond to key offshore engineering challenges and support projects that complement existing research, fill gaps or add cross-cutting activities. The research being funded in this first Flexible Fund call ranges from new and novel technologies for autonomously inspecting offshore wind farms to advanced satellite observations to improve the performance of offshore renewable installations.

Professor Deborah Greaves, director of the Hub, said: “The Supergen ORE Hub’s first call for Flexible Funding has received a great deal of interest, with a large number of high quality research proposals submitted. We are delighted to award this funding aimed at enabling researchers, in collaboration with industry partners, to deliver fundamental research that will advance the development of the offshore renewable energy sector.”

The funded research projects:

  • ALPHA: Numerical Analysis of Laterally Loaded Piles Divided in Chalk (Imperial College London);
  • Autonomous Biomimetic Robot-fish for Offshore Wind Farm Inspection (University of York);
  • Passive Control of Wave Induced Platform Motions for Semi-submersible FOWTs (Manchester Metropolitan University);
  • Flow measurement for accurate tidal turbine design (University of Bath);
  • Accounting for Current in Wave Buoy Measurements (University of Manchester);
  • Novel Approaches for Physical Model Testing of Floating Wind Turbine Platforms (University of Strathclyde);
  • Enhancing Control Capability of ORE Systems for Stress Management and Grid Support (University of Warwick);
  • Veers’ Extension to Non-neutral Incoming Winds (VENTI) (University of Surrey);
  • Satellite Climate Observation for Offshore Renewable Energy Cost Reduction (SCORE) (University of Edinburgh);
  • Recycling Composite Wind Turbine Blade for High-Performance Composite Manufacturing (University of Strathclyde).