Brian and Lucy are both Research Fellows in the Institute for Energy Systems. Brian’s works on the ReDAPT project - a £15M Industrial/Research collaboration centred around a 1MW commercial scale tidal turbine. The project is approaching the final phase of the programme. For 3 years the University of Edinburgh have been working with the turbine developers, Alstom Ocean Energy (formerly TGL) and numerical modelling teams at DNVGL and EDF/University of Manchester. The seminar will cover a broad overview of our flow measurement campaigns at EMEC, links with the modelling and turbine teams and the many challenges encountered as we head into the final lap and trialling various power supplies and grounding strategies for subsea instrumentation for the 1MW Alstom tidal turbine installed at EMEC.

Lucy's first degree was in Mechanical Engineering from University College, Dublin. She worked in manufacturing for a couple of years before deciding that working for an American multinational was not her cup of tea. She went on to complete a PhD at Edinburgh with Gareth Harrison, on the impacts of climate change on wind energy. Since finishing in 2009, she has worked as a post-doc researcher on the EU FP7 projects Marina Platform and TROPOS, and the EPSRC Aries project, and is now the main investigator for Edinburgh on Leanwind. Much of the work that Lucy does involves the analysis of renewable energy resources. As part of the Marina Platform project, she developed some tools for interacting with spatial data, including resources, via Geographic Information Systems (GIS) - for instance, to identify suitable sites for a specific renewable energy technology. One recent aspect of this has been using GIS to visualise the levelised cost of offshore wind energy in European waters, so Lucy will present some of the methods and findings from this. Lately, her work on the Leanwind project has segued into using met-ocean data to analyse accessibility for offshore energy developments, i.e. identifying how often the weather is calm enough to go out and do maintenance. She will present some initial work on this and further plans for the project.

The seminar team would like to thank the Engineering Graduate Society (EngGradSoc) for its funding and support of this seminar series.