Marine Current Turbines Ltd (MCT), Mojo Maritime Ltd (MML), Queens University Belfast (QUB) and the University of Edinburgh (UoE) have formed a collaboration to further develop MCT’s proposals for a fully submerged evolution of the current SeaGen device deployed in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. The project aims to produce a fully submerged variant of the turbine for applications in water depths greater than 35m. The work is under supported by a grant under the TSB call “Wave & Tidal Stream Technology -Strand 2 -Novel Concept Devices”.
This collaboration has been formed on the basis of the skills and resources provided by each of the members:
- MCT are the technology developers with a long term business plan dependent on the success of the development of marine tidal turbine technologies.
- MML are a marine contracting company with a business development plan dependent on the success of the development of tidal and wave technology development, and are hence keen to support early stage development to input their expertise at the design and evaluation stage.
- UoE have had a long term involvement in tidal and wave energy research and have facilities and staff that can support the early concept development and evaluation phases of the proposed project.
- QUB have a facility in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland which can be used to deploy a large scale model. They have the expertise to deploy, monitor and evaluate the results from the large scale model.
This document outlines how each of the project partners proposes to exploit the outputs of the project.
The main focus of the project is that of operation and maintenance of the turbines. The project aims to provide a full scale design which will facilitate easy access that can be conducted by low cost, readily available vessels relatively independent of weather conditions. This approach can readily be seen in the SeaGen device with the surface breaking structure and the ability to raise the cross beam to gain access to the drive trains. This rationale is focussed on reducing the cost of tide energy generation and providing a step change in its strength as a competitive renewable energy generation technology.