Following receipt of a £2.5million grant from the Technology Strategy Board OWEL is now engaged in the process of:
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The key results and findings from the recently completed phase of development of the OWEL wave energy converter have been published at the International Conference on Ocean Energy (ICOE) in Bilbao, Spain. A copy of the paper can be found here
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Following receipt of a £2.5million grant award from the Technology Strategy Board OWEL is now engaged in the process of:
Posted in News
A recent tank-testing programme has produced results that are highly significant for the commercial viability of the OWEL Wave Energy converter (WEC). Director, Professor John Kemp, explains that the OWEL WEC uses the horizontal component of wave action to compress the air in successive wave troughs and thence to drive a turbine. A target efficiency of 30% for wave to air power conversion, combined with 80% for air to electrical power conversion would provide a wave to wire efficiency of some 25%. These figures, together with the low capital costs and particularly low operational costs of the OWEL WECs allow Read more…
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OWEL have completed the latest phase of development of the OWEL wave energy converter. This work, that was funded by the South West Regional Development Agency, SWRDA, began towards the end of 2008 and has encompassed a number of different modelling methods and future design work. A small scale model was tested in a wave flume at the University of Southampton and was used to examine a number of different geometric configurations. The optimised design performed well and wave to air power conversion efficiencies exceeding the target figure were measured over a range of sea states. The performance of the Read more…
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The wave to compressed air technology developed by Offshore Wave Energy and IT Power has been boosted by a grant from the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) together with contributions from existing shareholders. Invented by Professor John Kemp, and originally revealed in the April 2003 edition of Eureka, the intention is to come up with an optimised full scale design of the machine. Running alongside a long term physical and mathematical modelling research programme in the Department of Engineering at the University of Southampton, the new study will focus on the internal configuration in order to maximise performance and Read more…
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