Turning the Tide
At the forefront of developing wave and tidal power is IT Power’s Bristol-based Marine Group, a division of IT Power Ltd. This 12-person strong marine energy team concentrates on delivering engineering services enabling the development of wave and tidal power. IT Power is in the vanguard of marine energy innovation. This is demonstrated by its role as lead partner in an
software to visualise and simulate ideas before they were put into production. As a start-up looking into technologies that could improve the environment, they were able to sign up to Autodesk’s Clean Tech Partner Programme. This allows early-stage clean technology companies to benefit from Autodesk’s solutions for Digital Prototyping, including Autodesk Inventor 2011, by receiving up to €120,000 worth of software for only €50.
In particular, the company has been making extensive use of Autodesk Inventor to run a simulation for a transmission system it is developing. As Tim Twibell, senior marine engineer,
IT Power explains, “the
transmission system we are developing to take power from the hydrofoils has a series of slow moving cranks and conrods, rather like an internal combustion engine. We first obtained time series load data for the foils from separate mathematical simulations. We then put this data into a 3D model in Inventor and allowed those loads to effectively turn the crank shaft and run the device in simulation.
“This has been a major benefit, allowing us to resolve forces throughout the cycle and output them on the crank,” Twibell continues. “It has saved us time, effort and money. Instead of having to run these kinds of calculations using spreadsheets and complex mathematical formulae alone, we now have a compelling visual means of checking their accuracy, simply by running these simulations on Inventor.”
EU-funded consortium working on a project to develop an innovative tidal energy device which uses oscillating horizontal hydrofoils instead of traditional rotating blades to generate renewable energy.
This pioneering approach offers many advantages over existing tidal stream technology, maximising the area that can be swept (and hence the power captured) in a given depth of water. This makes the technology particularly suitable to shallow tidal flows, offering smaller support structures and cheaper installation costs than many competing systems.
The company’s Bristol office is the operational hub for this project. IT Power’s team is providing consultancy in engineering, project management and project development to the consortium. Critically, the company is also undertaking mechanical and structural design in order to develop the device itself.
How Technology Helps
To drive this development, IT Power’s Marine Group realised that it needed to use high quality 3D design
21 entrepreneurcountry
Today, IT Power is working on the development of a pre-production 1.2MW prototype of its innovative tidal power technology and is looking towards a scheduled installation date of the end of 2011. IT Power’s aim is to commercialise the technology that it is currently developing and to use to prototype effectively as a demonstrator to highlight that the design can ultimately be sold to interested parties.
Riding the Wave of Innovation
As the need for renewable energy grows, so too will the competition to create the most efficient and cost effective technologies to meet demand and to do this companies will have to innovate. If companies, such as IT Power, are to successfully ride this wave of innovation, they will need to use high-quality digital design technology. Autodesk’s CleanTech Partner Programme allows IT Power to use such technology to test its designs, for a fraction of the cost that would be incurred using more conventional means.
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