Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Research Group at UCC.

The SHED group have expertise in offshore renewable energy (ORE) including wave, tidal and offshore wind energy. Our research activities in this sector ranges from planning and consenting policy development of ORE to working alongside device developers enabling technology advancement. 

Wave tank testing of ORE devices.

The SHED group has access to UCC’s LiR National Ocean Test Facility (NOTF) for the laboratory testing of small to medium scale offshore wind, wave and tidal energy devices in a controlled environment. LiR houses four different wave tanks providing options for different scale testing and ocean test conditions, further details of which can be found here https://www.lir-notf.com/

In a collaboration with TEAMER (which is the U.S. Department of Energy’s research program Testing Expertise and Access for Marine Energy Research ),  the SHED group carried out tank testing with Applied Research Associates at the Ohmsett Test Facility, New Jersey USA in May 2023. The facility provides an outdoor ground concrete test tank, which is one of the largest tanks in North America, measuring 203 meters long by 20 meters wide and 2.4 meters deep.  Tank testing was conducted on an Ocean Energy (OE) 1:15 scale model prototype of the OE35 buoy wave energy converter (WEC) to study its operational and structural performance in extreme waves. The results from the testing of the scaled model prototype will be used to provide input to the design, development, modelling and optimisation of the full-scale OE35 WEC device (WEDUSEA).