The UK needs a new generation of engineers trained to design, build, and maintain offshore wind, wave, and tidal energy devices in hostile sea conditions. A consortium of the Universities of Edinburgh, Exeter, and Strathclyde, together with marine science and engineering partners, is establishing an Industrial Doctorate Centre (IDC) to produce those specialists. The problem is straightforward: the UK has ambitious targets for offshore renewable energy, but lacks enough highly skilled scientists and engineers to design, install, and operate devices at affordable cost with minimal environmental impact. The IDC will train doctoral students through a combination of academic research, unique experimental facilities—including wave tanks, fatigue testing rigs, and offshore measurement arrays—and placements at large-scale test and demonstration sites such as the European Marine Energy Centre. If successful, the centre will create a tightly knit cohort of graduates with hands-on experience in applied research and development, directly supplying the offshore renewables sector with the technical leadership it needs to scale up from prototypes to commercial deployment.
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A consortium of the Universities of Edinburgh, Exeter and Strathclyde , suppoted by the Scottish Association for Marine Sicences (SAMS) and HR-Wallingford is proposing the formation of an Industrial Doctorate Centre (IDC) in Offshore Renewable Technologies. This partnership offers a unique combination of experience in research, development and knowledge exchange with major industry stakeholders in offshore renewable energy and offshore engineering in the naval architecture and oil and gas sectors. This is complemented by the extensive experience of SAMS in the environmental and societal impacts of offshore renewable energy projects. Large-scale commercial deployment of offshore renewables technology will require development of new techniques and technologies to design, build, install, operate, and maintain devices in hostile environments at affordable economic costs and with minimal environmental impact. The drive to meet the UK's ambitious deployment targets requires a supply of highly trained scientists and engineers to deliver their skills across the sector. The consortium is ideally-placed to support the industry in meeting these challenges through a conjoined infrastructure, which begins in some of the best academic research centres with leading test facilities and extends through a unique combination of demonstration facilities, ultimately to test and deployment sites. The partner universities already collaborate closely through their leadership of UK and European flagship programmes listed below. We propose to form an IDC in Offshore Renewable Energy that will conduct internationally leading research, providing a vibrant training environment and delivering a body of high-quality post-doctoral staff to realise this opportunity. In addition to providing a solid background in professional, technical and transferable skills the IDC training program will develop a tightly knit cohort of highly skilled graduates forming a strong foundation for the future development of the sector. Their training will be innovative and multi-disciplinary, using a variety of delivery methods, and utilising unique experimental facilities (such as Strathclyde University's Wave/Towing tank and advanced materials development and testing facility, the new All UK Waters Combined Current and Wave Test Facility and existing tanks and flumes in Edinburgh, the offshore measurement systems (Wave and ADCP measurement array and surveying), South West Mooring Test Facility (SWMFT), accelerated fatigue testing facilities (DMAC) in Falmouth, and survey vessels in Oban and Exeter) and field study areas provided by the host Universities. Through established links with partner organisations including HR-Wallingford, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), the National Renewable Energy Centre (NaREC), and the WaveHub, students will be placed and, wherever possible site-trained in large-scale test facilities, prototype demonstration and small-farm demonstration sites. The training will also benefit from the extensive experience of the consortium in advanced engineering analysis and simulation, and access to UK-leading computational facilities. The training package offered by the IDC will provide the students with unparalleled engineering experience in applied offshore renewable energy R&D.
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