The SNMREC Preferred Partner Program is an opportunity for our industry partners to collaborate more fully with the Center. This program is designed to dedicate SNMREC experts and resources to individual industry partner development needs.
News
Submitted by galsenas on Tue, 09/10/2013 - 16:45
SNMREC, UNO, and VT Awarded NSF EPAS Grant
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Energy, Power, and Adaptive Systems (EPAS) Program has awarded a collaborative proposal between the SNMREC, University of New Orleans School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and Virginia Polytechnic and State University's (VT) Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems (CEHMS) to develop autonomous electromechanical and position control for a farm of ocean current turbines. Dr. Jim VanZwieten, an Assistant Research Professor with the SNMREC, and Principal Investigator of FAU's portion of the award, will be contributing dynamic turbine modeling expertise and leveraging the SNMREC's tools for the project.
While private companies are busy developing single turbine unit subsystems and demonstrating energy conversion and turbine dynamics features, this award will begin work to prepare generically-applicable control algorithms for efficiently operating buoyant submerged ocean current turbines in a farm and with varying ocean conditions. Preliminary algorithms will be tested with a novel physics-based simulation and with laboratory experiments using the SNMREC's Ocean Current Power Generation Simulator. Work is set to begin October 1st, 2013 and results will be available by September 30, 2016.
The NSF award notice and abstract are available online.
