Engineering news
Tidal energy specialist Atlantis has signed a development contract with Lockheed Martin to advance its technology and create the largest single rotor tidal turbine on the market.
Lockheed Martin has begun work on optimising the design of Atlantis' new 1.5MW tidal turbine, the AR1500, and has already produced significant advancements to the turbine's design, increasing its capability and functionality.
Tim Cornelius, chief executive of Atlantis Resources, said: “The rotor blades now have full variable pitch, whereas historically they have been fixed. It will also have full yaw capability which means its got 220 degrees of rotate to take in the ebb and flow tides and create maximum yield of power.”
Further improvements include the doubling and sometimes tripling of its redundancy on all the critical systems that exist in the turbine, an incredibly important improvement to make, Cornelius said, when the machine is continually submerged between longer servicing intervals of five to six years.
The AR1500 is to initially support the MeyGen project – the world's largest tidal stream project under development – in Scotland’s Pentland Firth and one in Canada's Bay of Fundy. Construction is set to start in the second half of this year, with the first power being produced by early 2015. Once completed, the MeyGen project is expected to deliver up to 400MW of power, enough energy to power 200,000 homes.
New technological advancements will be tested during the deployment of AR1500 at MeyGen, one significant change to previous models, said Cornelius, will be the use of sub-sea wet-mate connectors to transport power back to shore, rather than the traditionally used dry-mate connectors, which have to be lifted out of the water and connected on a barge.
In 2013 Lockheed Martin and Atlantis entered into an exclusive teaming partnership to develop technology, components and projects in the tidal power sector on a global basis. The two companies have been working together for four years, most recently on the delivery of the ETI TEC Demonstrator programme, a public-private partnership between global industries – BP, Caterpillar, EDF, E.ON, Rolls-Royce and Shell – and the UK government, which is aimed at bringing a step-change reduction in the cost of deploying tidal turbines in commercial arrays.
Cornelius said Lockheed and Atlantis also plan to deploy tidal turbines in previously ignored low-speed current sites around UK waters. Research in this area is being done as part of the ETI programme, to create larger rotor blades, of 20m, previous rotor blades have only been built as large as 18m, that are able to capture higher yields of energy in low-speed environments.