Oceanflow Energy has been awarded a contract by the University of the Algarve (UAlg) to lease its scale Evopod E1 unit for trials off Portugal.
The objective of the SCORE research program is to examine the E1 unit in a shallow-water estuarine environment, looking at both the impacts of the turbine on its environment and the effects of the flow conditions on the turbine.
The 1:10 scale E1 unit will be deployed for trials at Ria Formosa estuary, located in the Algarve, southern Portugal.
The unit was previously tested at Strangford Narrows in Northern Irleand, from 2008 to 2011, in collaboration with researchers from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).
SCORE project, short for Sustainability of using Ria Formosa Currents On Renewable Energy production, is coordinated by the Centre for Marine and Environmental Research (CIMA) at UAlg, with the participating researchers from CIMA-UALG, Centro de Ciências do Mar (CCMAR) and Research Centre for Spatial and Organizational Dynamics (CIEO-UALG).
The project officially began on April 1, 2016, and will run for 36 months.