OES-Blue energy collaborative scholarship

Call for Applications

  • The Blue Energy Collaborative Scholarship (BECS) grant advances formative research in the field of offshore renewable energy and promotes collaboration and communication amongst early-career professionals from diverse disciplines, institutions, and nations.

    Up to 1000€ can be awarded to cover research expenses, such as raw materials and instrumentation, and travel expenses. This encompasses travel to the research institute where the collaborative work will take place or conference travel.

    In addition to providing an opportunity for international work, the Ocean Energy Systems (OES) BECS grant seeks to advance the field of offshore renewable energy through publication of research results and journal papers, making the results accessible to a wide audience.

  • 1. OES-BECS applications must involve at least two INOREans, from two different research organizations and must be early-stage career researchers.

    2. The aim of OES-BECS scholarships is the international collaboration. Due to this, at least two members of the team must be affiliated to institutions from different countries.

    3. (optional) One bonus point will be awarded to the team with at least one collaborator from underserved regions.

    1. Work carried out utilizing support from an OES-BECS grant should result in the submission of a journal or conference paper, and information of the work will be provided for use on the INORE website, and for information for sponsors. A summary (in any case), a Power Point presentation (if the results are presented in a conference) and/or a poster presentation (if the results are presented in a journal paper) should be sent to INORE.

    2. OES-BECS and INORE should be part of the acknowledgements.

    3. INOREans must send an update of the budget and plan before the second installment is given. The update must include execution and modifications made, including stage information and more details about the research, using the initial version submitted with the application as a reference. INORE assumes that this deadline is enough to organize the work. The plan and budget must be approved in order to get the second installment of the grant. If this milestone is not achieved the granted INOREans will lose the funding and it will be offered to another project.

    4. 50% of the grant will be transferred to the research team at the time of the publication of the awarded teams list. The rest of the grant will be transferred as follows:

      • INORE will refund the costs of the collaboration after receiving tickets for flights and accommodation, or other expenses (up to total funding). This will be awarded as soon as the result of the collaboration is submitted (or planned to be submitted) to a journal or a conference within the 2026 calendar year. The cost of the final expense must be within reason in accordance to the updated approved budget submitted to INORE.

      • The deadline for requesting the money associated to the grant or the expected results of OES-BECS grant is at the end of the 2026 Calendar year. The amount of money that will not be transferred to the research team will be invested in other INORE activities.

Applications Closed

Past OES-BECS Project Awardees

Hamed Nademi, Alin Hanna, Erik Jocelyn, and Gabriel Tellez Ornelas

2024, CSU San Marcos

CSUSM team uses the already developed Ocean Wave Energy converter concept and preliminary prototype as part of the DOE MECC 2024 to be employed for the proper conditioning of the wave energy converter power take-off system (PTO). In this year competition we plan to look into hardware development and further study different designs of PTO system requirements with respect to the operational specifications, manufacturing and market analysis, and marketing plan. The wave energy converter together with other marine renewables aim to power desalination plant. The desalination plant is in operation in Carlsbad, CA serves 10% of the water supply in San Diego County. Our team has interviewed the technical advisor of this plant and already initiated a plan to involve Carlsbad Desalination plant to our experimental set-up development and field data exchange. This is on-going process, and we hope the CSUSM team award this scholarship will lead to acquiring a hardware equipment needed to perform an actual data analysis and a pilot testing in Spring 2025. The principal outcomes of the project in this year are: 1) Demonstrate a proof-of-concept of a desalination plant powered by renewable energy (wave energy converter) and show the feasibility for designing, fabricating, and testing of scale-model prototype, 2) establish industry partnership with regional marine industry, 3) Advance the outcomes of the competition to local community colleges and Public High School System's early college entry program in San Diego County, CA. to disseminate the findings and results, we expect to submit a journal and conference papers.

Qiang Gao (1), Nesimi Ertugrul (1), Alva Bechlenberg (2), and Antonis I. Vakis (2)

2022, (1) The University of Adelaide, (2) University of Groningen

Offshore wind and wave power are abundant energy sources and could provide long term contributions to our future energy supply. Unlike wind turbines, whose technological maturity has enabled tremendous growth in recent years, wave energy converters (WECs) are still not commercially viable despite hundreds of devices having been proposed in the last century. This lack of convergence towards a mature WEC design prohibits their further development since significant capital expenditures are needed to develop systems whose economic performance –especially due to the large uncertainty in operations and maintenance costs because of the harsh working conditions involved– is hard to predict. The integration of offshore wind and wave energy, on the other hand, presents a number of benefits reported in the literature, including enhanced energy production, cost reduction due to shared facilities and energy variability reduction. However, most studies focus on the hydrodynamic response and pure economic analysis/comparison of combined wind and wave conversion systems. In terms of distinct power intermittency between both renewables, large power variations lead to a significant challenge to effective electrical power regulation and transmission. Therefore, energy storage systems are required in ocean energy harnessing to mitigate the energy variability for a reliable and consistent electrical supply, thereby forming more dispatchable renewables. However, energy storage systems suitable for ocean energy have not been systematically studied from technical and economic perspectives. In this project, we will analyse the requirements of distributed energy storage for offshore wind turbines and compare them with combined offshore wind and wave systems based on a techno-economic assessment while achieving the same level of power smoothing effect. 

The main contributions of this project are: first, to investigate the power intermittency between the offshore wind and wave energy resources and how it can be mitigated by using energy storage systems; second, to compare the feasibility and energy variability reduction of a wind turbine with a distributed storage system and a wind turbine with a wave energy converter system through a techno-economic assessment. In addition, different potential sea sites for developing offshore energy farms in European and Australian regions are compared and discussed to investigate the sensitivity of location selection.

Therefore, this study could provide more systematic reviews for industry partners, investors and policymakers at the pre- planning stage of developing ocean renewable energy systems.

Vaibhav Raghavan (1), Touhidul Islam (2), Dr. George Lavidas (1) and Prof. Venki Venugopal (2)

2023, (1) TU Delft, (2) University of Edinburgh

Wave energy converters (WECs) are expected to significantly contribute to the energy transition, however this is dependent on their interactions with the resource. Calculating the power generated by WECs depends  heavily  on  the  accurate  modelling  of  wave-structure  interactions.  The  boundary  element  method (BEM) based on the linear potential flow theory has yielded accurate results at low computational costs when compared  to  complex  numerical methods such as Computational  Fluid  Dynamics. WAMIT (commercial) and Nemoh (open source) are two of the most popular BEM solvers based on the linear potential flow theory and have been widely used for analyzing wave-structure interaction for WECs. Hydrodynamic  Analysis  of  Marine  Structures (HAMS) is a  recently  developed  open-source  BEM  frequency  domain  solver. To  date  it  has  been  applied  to  single  WECs  with  spherical/cylindrical/rectangular  geometries and the TALOS WEC considering rigid body motions. HAMS offers unique advantages over other solvers by providing accurate solutions compared to more popular open-source solvers such as Nemoh, and lower computational costs as compared to both Nemoh and WAMIT, for specific cases, owing to its parallelization technique.  This research will extend its current capabilities to model flexible structures or structures with hinges/joints by applying the generalized modes approach. This will make it capable of analysing WECs such as the Attenuators or the Oscillating Surge Wave Energy Converter, thus making it the one of the most computationally efficient open source BEM solvers with the capability of analysing flexible structures or structures with hinges/joints.

This project is a collaboration between the Marine Renewable Energies Lab (MREL) at TU Delft and the Institute of Energy Systems at the University of Edinburgh. The project hopes to extend the capabilities of an existing computationally efficient open-source BEM solver, thus allowing it to be used to perform the hydrodynamic analysis for flexible structures or structures with joints and hinges. Subsequently, it is expected to present these results, or part of them, at an international conference related to topics such as renewable energies, numerical wave modelling, blue energy, energy and sustainability or wave energy harvesting by converters. The collaborator Vaibhav Raghavan, from TU Delft, will attend a research stay at the University of Edinburgh (partially funded). The funds provided by the OES blue energy collaborative scholarship would be used to cover the part of the expenses that the researcher Raghavan will incur during his stay at the Edinburgh. Also, another part of the OES BECS amount would be invested to pay the travel expenses to attend a conference where the research findings will be presented.

Manuel Alejandro Corrales (1), Giovanni Besio (1) and George Lavidas (2)

2023, (1) University of Genoa, (2) TU Delft

Renewable energies acquired relevance in last decades after impacts of fossil energy consumption, more recently, because of the shutdowns of energy supplies such as natural gas. The good practices and Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations (SGDs) aim to optimize the efficient use of resources and reduce the environmental impact, so clean energies from the sea are a suitable option to follow the same target. In addition, it is interesting how the wave energetic behaves along the Pacific region of Central America, where the maritime climate and meteo-oceanic conditions differ significantly from those of the North Sea, Northern Pacific Ocean, or the Mediterranean Sea, where research is at an advanced stage. Because of the above-mentioned, a wave energy assessment will perform over the Central American region of the Pacific Ocean. The development of a calibrated and validated 40 years-wave hindcast over the whole Pacific basin was performed by using an unstructured wave model by using the Wavewatch III model. Specifically, the region of study extends from -4° to 16° in latitude, and from -92.7° up to -76.6 ° western longitude. The wave modelling considers a higher spatial resolution over the Central American region, and hourly output results. Thus, a finer wave hindcast outcomes will be used as input information to the energetic assessment. There exist numerous investigations in repositories regarding to the ocean energies, several of them based on studies over the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance. The project presented herein aims to publish the findings of the wave energy assessment described above in a high impact scientific journal, according to commonly consulted metrics. Subsequently, it is expected to present these results, or part of them, at an international conference related to topics such as renewable energies, numerical wave modelling, blue energy, energy and sustainability or wave energy harvesting by converters. Likewise, this project is a collaborative work between two departments, MetOcean, at the University of Genoa, and the Marine & Hydro based energies at the Offshore Engineering group at the Delft University of Technology. The collaborator Manuel Corrales, from the University of Genova, will attend a research stay at the University of Technology Delft (partially funded) regarding to the wave energy in the Pacific Central American region. The funds provided by the OES blue energy collaborative scholarship would be used to cover the part of the expenses that the researcher Corrales will incur during his stay at the University of Delft. Also, another part of the OES BECS amount would be invested to pay the travel expenses to attend a conference where the research findings will be presented.