World’s First Floating Wind Innovation Centre Opens
Transition Zone, ORE Catapult’s £9 million National Floating Wind Innovation Centre (FLOWIC), delivered in collaboration with ETZ Limited, is designed to help supercharge the development of floating offshore wind technology in the UK, with funding from both the Scottish Government and Innovate UK.Floating offshore wind represents a huge economic opportunity, with more than 19GW of potential projects in the pipeline through the ScotWind Leasing process, a new leasing round on the horizon in the Celtic Sea, and the prospect of transferring skills and knowledge from oil and gas to aid the
Partners Developing Underwater Single Photon Imaging System
A consortium of universities and technology companies led by marine technology company Sonardyne is working to develop a groundbreaking underwater single photon mapping and imaging system. The partners have been awarded £2.7 million in funding from the Innovate UK Commercializing Quantum Technologies Challenge.The revolutionary underwater single photon imaging system (USPIS) project will develop next generation technology and equipment capable of delivering wide area coverage and high-resolution 3D images in all underwater environments.The consortium brings together decades of expertise and
HydroSurv Funded to Commercialize Robotic Seagrass Solution
HydroSurv, a provider of electric and hybrid uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), secured Innovate UK funding to commercialize an end-to-end seagrass monitoring solution with support from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).The project aims to provide a rapidly scalable, low-impact and comprehensive answer to the numerous challenges of monitoring seagrass meadows by combining HydroSurv USV platforms with an automated data processing toolchain. The robotic solution will be demonstrated over spring and summer 2024 at three designated worksites on the south west coast of
AI & Seabed Mapping Project Recognized
noise from sonar data. This was carried out by two MSc Computing Science students, supervised by Dr. Wenjia Wang and Dr. Ben Milner, and a team from GeoAcoustics.Following encouraging results, further R&D grants were awarded; an Enabling Innovation: Research To Application (EIRA) award, and an Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). These enabled an AI module to be developed which was then evaluated using various benchmark data sets and sea trials.This established that the AI was able to produce accurate and consistent results comparable to that of an experienced surveyor, without needing
How AI Can Aid Coastal Water Quality Monitoring
Interface (GUI). The goal is to narrow the set of parameters that are needed to model predictions for high coliform events, thereby reducing the cost of monitoring and evaluating these events, and enabling more systems to be deployed in increased locations longer term.The project is being funded by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, in conjunction with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as part of a series of innovation projects that can improve the observation capabilities of the UK’s waters, towards improved assessment and evaluation of the status and
RS Aqua Score Funding for AI Marine Mammal Protection Plan
RS Aqua won funding to develop a new system to monitor the underwater environment. Collaborating with the University of Southampton and funded by Innovate UK, the MARLIN project will develop an underwater sensor that uses machine learning to identify harmful environmental activities and transmits information in real time to a web app. This is designed to allow stakeholders to remotely monitor the underwater environment and make decisions in real time. MARLIN will develop several new technologies: new machine learning techniques to distinguish between ambient and unusual environmental noise (such
UK Minister Opens £3m DARE Centre for Offshore Renewable Energy Testing
specialist skills, improve reliability, and reduce the carbon footprint of the next generation of offshore wind farms.”The DARE Centre has been funded through UK Government’s Getting Building Fund, managed in the region by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (North East LEP), and Innovate UK.Enshore Subsea, BeeX, and Aspira Aerial Applications have signed up to test their products at the new DARE Centre. Aspira is developing a specialist coating, sprayed onto a wind turbine blade by drone to remove salt build up and detritus, with the aim of improving turbine power output and minimizing
AutoNaut USV to Trial Winch Cast to 100m
AutoNaut won funding from Innovate UK to develop a method to achieve a winch cast to 100m. The challenge is to get the cast to sink to depth from a wave propelled vessel that does not stop. The trial will take place in Loch Ness in summer 2023. “Since we started the company ten years ago, we have searched for a suitable winch to try this,” said Mike Poole, founding Director of AutoNaut. “This winch fits the special needs of our 5m USV in terms of size, power demand and controllability. Now we need a method to get the cast to sink to the right depth rather than
Funding Granted for "World’s First" Vessel Charging Station within Offshore Wind Farm
A renewable energy technology consortium has secured £1.5 million funding to what they say is "the world’s first offshore charging station within a UK wind farm."The funding was awarded as part of the UK's Department for Transport and Innovate UK’s £60 million Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition (CMDC) grant.Project leaders Oasis Marine, who specialize in marine charging solutions, have partnered with power electronics and rapid charging specialist Turbo Power Systems and, Verlume, an intelligent energy management and storage technologies specialist, and the
February 2024
