AUSTRALIA

 

OVERVIEW OF MAIN RESEARCH ACTIVITIES IN 2018:

 

Following a successful project to map Australia’s wave energy resource (http://nationalmap.gov.au/renewables/#share=s-gGd5ztFcxe2ysy9f), a project to map Australia’s tidal energy resource (http://austen.org.au/) is in its second year – led by University of Tasmania (AMC) and CSIRO. The project will cover a number of fronts including:

 

A new hub for marine energy research and innovation, the Wave Energy Research Centre (WERC), is led by the University of WA and is collocated in Perth and Albany was established in 2018. Over 30 research staff are working at the centre in marine renewable energy (including approximately 10 PhD students), working across, metocean analysis, physical oceanography, hydrodynamics and offshore geotechnical engineering.

 

WERC was established with funding from the Australian Research Council and ARENA, totalling about $2.2M. $3.75m of “Royalties for Regions” funding from the WA Government over a 4-year period and $1M matching contribution from UWA (+$6m in-kind). A specific aim of the WERC is Assist with the development of the Albany Wave Energy project by Carnegie Clean Energy (CCE), with contributions including:

 

University of Adelaide is working with Carnegie on multimodal point absorbers control systems using local HPC 400Megaflops and 5634 cores for numerical experiments, validated with local flume experiments. Two devices of interest, multi-moored device similar to CETO6, and a single point mooring asymmetric point absorber, are both demonstrating greater power returns than traditional devices. The university proposal to establish new Joint Australia-China Research Centre for offshore wind and wave energy has been shortlisted to the final 16, where 6-7 will be funded. A final decision expected in December 2018 for a start in early 2019. 

 

Swinburne University of Technology - Ongoing activities include a PhD project on nonlinear WEC behaviour with an emphasis on coastal protection, and projects on laboratory and numerical modelling of environmental impacts of WECs.

 

University of NSW Water Research Lab is undertaking a study of tidal energy in the Cook Islands. They have completed a 6-month field investigation on the potential of tidal energy in the Cooks Islands with deployment of multiple instruments in Muri Lagoon. This new field data will be used to perform a more detailed resource assessment along Rarotonga shoreline. The potential for coastal protection benefits of ORE and the impact on beach recovery post-storm will also be considered. 

 

Griffith University Centre for Coastal Management is focused on wave climate studies at both the global and very nearshore local scales, and is also active in coastal processes research which may be useful, for example, for studies into the interaction of OE technology with the coastal ocean/morphology. A Coastal Engineering Research Field Station on the Gold Coast funded by an ARC LIEF grant in collaboration with the Gold Coast Waterways Authority, University of Queensland and University of Newcastle, has a range of monitoring equipment including a wave radar, manometry, lidar and cameras. Monitoring data collected will assist with wave climate model development and performance evaluation in the very nearshore. A 1979 to present wave hindcast dataset for the nearshore coastal waters of the Gold Coast region extending down to Ballina in the south and the Sunshine coast in the north is under development. This model is a downscaling of CAWCRs CFSR driven hindcast. Evaluation of 2D wave spectra model output is planned against wave buoy derived spectra including global scale hindcast datasets and locally downscaled model output. This will contribute to the analysis of the latest COWCLIP global wave climate ensemble to quantify the sources of uncertainty and variance amongst the ensemble members.