U.S. Department of Energy Marine Energy Collegiate Competition (MECC)
Team Name: Ocean Energy Aggies
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, North Carolina
Team deliverables
- Poster: Tidal Energy Conversion System
- Report: Report: Ocean Energy Aggies: S-Series Energy Device
- Presentation: Renewable Ocean Wave Energy: Design of a Novel Oscillating Water Column
- Recording of virtual team presentation
Why this competition?
Participating in the U.S. Department of Energy Marine Energy Collegiate Competition provides the Ocean Energy Aggies the opportunity to help meet growing energy demands in coastal communities by harvesting the power of waves.
Project description
The Ocean Energy Aggies will design, build, and validate an oscillating water column wave energy converter (WEC).
Game plan
The team’s first objective is to use computational fluid dynamics to optimize the oscillating water column WEC by altering air chamber and turbine design parameters and aerodynamic features. While some team members design, build, and validate a scale-model device in the university’s new ocean wave renewable energy laboratory, others will complete numerical simulations of the device.
Team strengths
The Ocean Energy Aggies team includes both undergraduate and Ph.D. students from the Mechanical Engineering department at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In addition, the university’s new ocean wave renewable energy laboratory offers the perfect facility for the team to perform scale-model validation of their competition design.
Team hurdles
The team anticipates that having insufficient lead time on computational fluid dynamics simulations, manufacturing a complex device, and communicating effectively among team members represent their biggest challenges.
Competition objectives
The Ocean Energy Aggies team plans to design an efficient WEC by combining high-fidelity computational models with state-of-the-art experimental approaches.
By participating in the competition, the team hopes to sharpen their problem-solving skills, improve their ability to plan for and meet deadlines, and enhance their creativity.
This portal is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) under Contract Number DE- AC36-08GO28308 with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Contract Number DE-AC05-76RL01830 with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Contract Number DE-NA0003525 with Sandia National Laboratories, as part of the MHK Data Communities project. The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes.