A European consortium has secured more than €3m in funding for a new wave energy research project.
IMPACT (Innovative Methods for Wave Energy Pathways Acceleration through Novel Criteria and Test Rigs) is a new collaborative research and innovation project that will develop and demonstrate a next generation testing approach.
The three-year €3.3m project aims to accelerate testing device development and reduce the technology cost as part of a global advancement in wave energy converter technologies.
The funding is coming from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Partners in the project include VGA, an Italian engineering company, Yavin Four Consultants and the University College Cork MaREI.
“The main objective of IMPACT is to design and manufacture two novel test rigs covering up to 75% of WEC subsystems that affect the WEC’s levelized cost of energy (LCOE),” said Federico Gallorini, R&D manager at VGA and IMPACT project coordinator.
“The innovative 250kW Dual Hardware In-the-Loop testing platform, novel test criteria and metrics aim to reduce the test time by 50% while increasing the WEC reliability.”