Offshore Wave Energy (OWEL) in association with IT Power Ltd announce a further stage in the development of their innovative wave energy converter, 'Grampus'. This has been funded by a grant from the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) together with contributions from existing shareholders. New research into the geometric configuration of the Grampus, will focus on optimising its performance and investigating its structural loading and mooring requirements.

The SWRDA supported project has now commenced and will run in parallel with a longer term physical and mathematical modeling research programme currently being conducted in the Department of Engineering at the University of Southampton.

The main project focus will be on the internal configuration of the device in order to maximise the performance and efficiency of the WEC, but will also consider mooring, survivability and fatigue through a hydrodynamics programme involving comprehensive CFD modelling and a series of Tank tests in a selected Wave Basin.

On completion, OWEL will have an optimised full scale design for the Grampus platform, and a more detailed understanding of its very favourable performance and cost characteristics. Importantly, the project will have investigated the technical fatigue and survivability of the technology and considered production and manufacturing methods and approaches.

With this increased understanding of the Grampus WEC, the OWEL technology will be poised for application to the real marine environment and will move with confidence into the next stage of development involving a large scale sea trial demonstration.