Supporting development of marine sensors and marine energy environmental monitoring technologies
Triton works with project awardees funded through a U.S. Department of Energy funding opportunity announcement (FOA) to support the development of innovative monitoring technologies and advance their technical readiness level for in-water deployment.
This FOA was released in March 2016, in response to a workshop titled, “Instrumentation for Monitoring around Marine Renewable Energy Converters,” and which identified a need to better understand the state of instrumentation and capabilities for monitoring around marine energy devices, such as current energy converters (e.g., turbines) and wave energy converters.
The FOA supports seven projects focused on underwater noise, electromagnetic field measurements, studies of marine organism interaction, benthic habitat mapping techniques, and integrated marine sensor packages to improve our understanding and environmental monitoring of marine energy devices, including:
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University of Washington Drifting Acoustic Instrumentation SYstem (DAISY)
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Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Electromagnetic Field Detection
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University of Washington’s 3rd Generation Adaptable Monitoring Package (3G-AMP)
PNNL staff working on these projects, include fisheries biologists, engineers, modelers, oceanographers, electricians, data scientists, and scientific divers. Researchers at the Marine and Coastal Research Laboratory at PNNL-Sequim provide facility and technical support to each of the FOA projects. This support includes baseline testing, benchmarking improvements, and field testing and development before final demonstration.
Learn more about FOA technical development here.
As the technical readiness level for each project advances, the technologies are deployed at a higher-energy testing environment, such as the Hawai’i Wave Energy Test Site, on the Kaneohe Marine Corps Base Hawai’i, and CalWave Energy Test Center in San Diego, California. This last stage will help demonstrate the instruments’ capabilities in pre-permitted, grid-connected environments around energy converters.
