LUREG wins two grants for wave energy research

Lancaster University's Renewable Energy Group (LUREG) has won two major grants for wave energy research.

George Aggidis, director of LUREG, has been awarded £600,000 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for research into marine energy and £130,000 by the Joule Centre to carry out research into a new wave energy converter called WRASPA.

The EPSRC is the UK Government's funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, whereas the Joule Centre for Energy Research & Development is a partnership of North West Universities, commercial organisations and other stakeholders associated with the energy industry.

The EPSRC funding is part of a £5.5 million four-year research project SuperGen Marine 2 which will be carried out by LUREG and partners at the Universities of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Strathclyde and Queen's Belfast.

The University shared that the SuperGen Marine Energy Consortium aims to increase knowledge and understanding of the extraction of energy from the sea to reduce investment risk and uncertainty. Now in its second phase, Supergen Marine 2 will carry out further research into challenges facing Marine Energy from making designs more cost effective and energy efficient to improving methods of energy extraction.

WRASPA, which is currently in development, is designed to be a hinged device mounted on the sea bed. The top part of the device– the collector body – will be around 20 metres wide, and will harness both the surging forward and backward motion of the sea. Designed to work in water depths of around 20-50 metres, a scale model of the WRASPA wave energy converter will be evaluated and developed by means of computer modelling and wave tank tests in a joint programme between Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and Lancaster University (LU).