Category: News

John Ringwood, Professor Electronic Engineering and Director of the Centre for Ocean Energy Research at Maynooth University, has been elevated to Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is the 17th IEEE Fellow in Ireland and the first within the domain of control systems, nominated within the IEEE Control Systems Society, for his work on the development of energy-maximising control techniques for wave energy systems. Elevation to IEEE Fellow is a significant distinction, with a maximum of 0.1% of the total IEEE membership elevated in any one year. There is no application process – prospective Fellows must be independently nominated by another Fellow and supported by another 5 Fellows, distributed internationally. From the nominations, only around 30% are elevated. At the recent IEEE Conference on Decision and Control held in Singapore, John, along with co-authors from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy and Imperial College, London, was awarded the 2023 Outstanding Paper Prize for the IEEE Transactions on Control...

€22,000 stipend p.a. (tax free) + PhD fees + research expenses + travel The Centre for Ocean Energy Research (COER) at Maynooth University, Ireland has further opportunities for well-qualified applicants interested in PhD level research on the control of wave energy systems as part of 2 prestigious new projects under the supervision of Prof. John Ringwood FIEEE: Economic wave energy through technical innovation (SeaChange) MaxRotorWEC – a new control strategy for cyclorotor-based wave energy converters SeaChange Project Despite the vast global wave energy potential, and the need to diversify the range of renewable energy sources to provide dispatchable carbon-free energy, the current cost of wave energy makes it relatively uneconomic in relation to other renewable, and non-renewable, energy forms. This project proposes a combination of strategic technological improvements, with both broad applicability as well as specific device improvements, to effect a significant impact on the economic performance of wave energy systems and produce the step change needed to accelerate the technical and commercial development of...

From the 6th to 8th November, the Argentine Network of Marine Energies (REMA), in collaboration with the Center for Ocean Energy Research (COER), Maynooth University, Ireland, and the Marine Offshore Renewable Energy Lab (MOREnergy Lab), Politecnico di Torino, Italy, hosted the 8th Wave Energy Workshop in conjunction with the 2023 Argentine Meeting on Marine Energies (ENAEM 2023). This three-day event featured presentations and discussions on a wide range of topics related to ocean energy, with a focus on hydrodynamic modeling, control, resource assessment, and wave energy technology enhancement. The scope also included topics such as environmental impact, structural mechanics, and the economic, legal, and political aspects of ocean energy. Additionally, the workshop covered the latest developments in high-fidelity simulations and advanced numerical methods used in the field....

We were delighted to welcome Johannes Palm from Sigma Energy Marine and Claes Eskilsson from Research Institutes Sweden, who visited COER to give a workshop to introduce the simulation tool MoodyMarine, developed to help meet some of the demands for early stage development of MRE devices. MoodyMarine extends the previously released mooring module MoodyCore (Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Elements) with linear radiation-diffraction bodies, integrated pre-processing workflows and a graphical user interface. It is a C++ implementation of finite element mooring dynamics and Cummins equations for floating bodies with weak nonlinear corrections....

Highlights from this September's EWTEC conference in Bilbao included 8 COER presentations, technical trips to the Mutriku Power Plant and Bimep, a gala dinner to remember at the Guggenheim museum, but most importantly, the opportunity to connect and reconnect with the wave and tidal energy community....

We're delighted that a piece by COER team members Carrie, Ahsan and John, has been published on RTE brainstorm today, talking about the need for more support for wave energy development, and its potential as part of the renewable energy mix in Ireland.  Read more here: Why is the tide still out for wave energy in Ireland? (rte.ie)...

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Water Power Technologies Office is launching the Innovating Distributed Embedded Energy Prize (InDEEP) to encourage innovation in distributed embedded energy converter technology (DEEC-Tec, pronounced “deck tech”) to generate new, precommercial materials for wave energy conversion. This prize will challenge innovators from within and beyond wave energy to design and develop novel materials for marine energy applications that will lay the foundation for generating electricity at the grid scale. This three-phase, two-year competition is offering a combined cash prize pool up to $2.3 million. Teams will also receive technical support, teaming support, and other forms of mentorship throughout the prize to enable their success. Competitors will use innovative methods to identify DEEC-Tec components and materials that have high techno-economic potential for wave energy converters. Successful concepts developed through this prize are those that show the greatest techno-economic potential to contribute to grid-scale power systems. Through this prize, WPTO seeks to meet the following goals: Leverage innovation to systematically develop DEEC-Tec concepts that could...

The Centre for Ocean Energy Research (COER) at Maynooth University, Ireland has a further opportunity for 1 senior or entry level postdoctoral researcher on a prestigious new Science Foundation Ireland ocean energy project: Economic wave energy through technical innovation (SeaChange) Some project detail:                                                                                                                                       Despite the vast global wave energy potential, and the need to diversify the range of renewable energy sources to provide dispatchable carbon-free energy, the current cost of wave energy makes it relatively uneconomic in relation to other renewable, and non-renewable, energy forms. This project proposes a combination of strategic technological improvements, with both broad applicability as well as specific device improvements, to effect a significant impact on the economic performance of wave energy systems and produce the step change needed to accelerate the technical and commercial development of wave power.  Collaborators have been drawn from the University of Illinois (USA), CorPower Ocean AB (Sweden), National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL, USA) and TU Denmark. This project is funded by Science Foundation Ireland...

On 30th March 2023, Peter Conlon from the MU Commercialisation Office dropped by to give us a comprehensive overview of the world of intellectual property, particularly from the perspective of researchers and technology developers. As usual, the seminar prompted some lively debate about copyright protection in the world of Chat GBT open AI and the tension between the researcher’s perceived pressure to publish or to maintain radio silence until patents have been registered.  It was suggested that perhaps the solution lies in “know-how”; if the patent is registered can the know-how be documented and kept out of the public domain. Another issue for researchers can be dealing with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).  It was emphasised that NDAs protect the conversations that may occur between entities, but they do not cover potential future inventions....