Developing a reliability testing culture for ocean energy
European research and testing sites are working together to improve reliability testing, with the aim of building robustness into marine energy technology design and performance.
Scotland’s European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) is working with the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult and SPT Technical Research Institute of Sweden on the Reliability in a Sea of Risk (RiaSoR) project.
“RiaSoR addresses two of the main challenges identified by the OCEANERA-NET project: reliability and survivability of ocean energy technologies; and design and development of components for ocean energy technologies,” said Karen Fraser, marine energy senior executive at Scottish Enterprise and coordinator of OCEANERA-NET.
She continued: “This will ultimately reduce HSE risk, technological risks and operations and maintenance risks with the aim of lowering the levelised cost of energy for the sector, and speeding up progression to commercialisation.”
The project is funded through the OCEANERA-NET initiative, and will aim to establish industry best practice in reliability testing for wave and tidal energy devices through improved load measurements and verification.
Industry-approved reliability testing practices developed by RiaSoR will then be applied through the leading ocean energy testing houses.
This will aim to ensure consistency and robustness when reliability is demonstrated across all wave and tidal technologies.
Pierre Ingmarsson, from the SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, explained: “We want to develop a programme for transferring skills in reliability analysis to marine energy developers through the testing houses.”
“Therefore we will develop a programme for transferring skills in reliability analysis to marine energy developers through the testing houses. This will ensure that the practical methodologies developed in this project are taken up by industry and make a lasting impact,” he added.
The project will aim to educate the promising ocean energy industry on the impacts of variance mode and effect analysis methodology.
Mr Ingmarsson concluded: ““Therefore we will develop a programme for transferring skills in reliability analysis to marine energy developers through the testing houses.”
“This will ensure that the practical methodologies developed in this project are taken up by industry and make a lasting impact.”
By Alice Mason
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