RTI Team Leader proud of his “all volunteer army”

April was our Team’s “finalize design and order components” month. May is our “build and assemble” month so we can hit the wave tanks in June. We plan to utilize the UNH Chase Labs tank first for some initial shakedown trials. Its limited depth, however, requires us to finish our RTI F2 QD 1/20 model testing and tuning at the new U. Maine, Orono Wind-Wave (W2) Alfond facility with its 5 meter depth and state of the art Edinburgh digital wave makers. Our local fabrication and welding shops have done a great job with our 1.4 meter wide Float and Drag Plates. Next week they will be working on our twin vertical Spar Frame and our two watertight PTO housings (holding our motor-generator, gear reduction drives and encoders).

Nathan Weise and our RTI Electronics & Controls group (Diane Liskey, Rick Sparrold, Siavash Pakdelian, and Mahshid Amirabadi) are working with National Instruments Field Engineer, Peter Rifkin to assemble our DAQ and Programmable Control system.

Our Hydrodynamics & Simulation group (Dick Akers, Toby Dewhurst, and Michael Macnicoll) have our new 1/20 scale RTI F2 QD model up and going and are optimizing Float and Frame weight distributions, water plane areas and lots of other cool CFD stuff which I honestly do not fully understand.

As Team Leader I am proud of the work and accomplishments of our entire “All Volunteer Army”. The F2 QD is the 10th Generation of WEC RTI has developed and wave tank tested over the past 7 years. Wave Energy has an intrinsic cost advantage over solar and wind because it utilizes a renewable resource with several times higher energy density. We are hopeful that the Wave Energy Prize will provide the convergence needed on the most economically viable WEC concept(s) to make Wave Energy attractive to global global power equipment producers and renewables project developers which will turn wave energy into a major renewables industry.