Global Maritime Group, a provider of marine warranty, dynamic positioning and engineering services to the offshore sector and part of the European Commission's OPERA (Open Sea Operating Experience to Reduce Wave Energy) project consortium, announced that they and other consortium members have won the Yoshio Masuda prize.

Global Maritime Group, a provider of marine warranty, dynamic positioning and engineering services to the offshore sector and part of the European Commissions OPERA (Open Sea Operating Experience to Reduce Wave Energy) project consortium, announced that they and other consortium members have won the Yoshio Masuda prize.

The prize was awarded for a selection of papers on the latest OPERA project findings from Northern Spain and presented at the 12th European Wave & Tidal Conference held in Cork, Ireland.

The OPERA 12-member consortium presented multiple conference publications at the event charting the progress of the three-year OPERA project set up to progress offshore wave energy development, reduce costs (by up to 50%), and ‘de-risk new technologies. This is being achieved through the development of a full-scale floating oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converter ‘Marmok-A-5 developed by Oceantec Energías Marinas and being demonstrated at the BIMEP test site in the north of Spain.

At the conference, Global Maritime co-authored a paper based on design and field data collection studies that incorporated the environmental conditions, device motions and mooring tensions for the BIMEP test site deployment. The paper reported on design of the mooring load monitoring system as well as preliminary analysis of several load cases identified from field data recorded during the winter (2016/2017) of its first deployment. Comparisons were made to numerical simulations of the device and mooring system subjected to representative environmental conditions.

"We are delighted to be sharing our initial findings from the ground-breaking OPERA project and also getting recognized along with our other consortium partners with such a prestigious prize named after the founder of OWCs," said Paul Goodwin of Global Maritime.

He continues: "The acquisition of long-term, open sea, device and mooring system response data, combined with comprehensive numerical modeling, is fundamental to ensuring device efficiency and survivability. We look forward to sharing more findings over the coming months."

As part of the OPERA project, Global Maritime is responsible for providing mooring support in the project. In particular, Global Maritime is supporting the testing and integrating of two cost-reducing innovations into the Marmok-A-5. These include a shared moorings system designed to reduce total amount of mooring line lengths, share anchors and reduce costs; and an elastomeric mooring tether, developed by the University of Exeter and which will reduce peak loads at mooring and hull connections. This will improve structural survivability and reduce mooring line strength requirements and costs.

As well as Global Maritime, OPERA consortium members consist of TECNALIA (Spain) who are the project leaders; Oceantec Energías Marinas (Spain); the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (Spain); Ente Vasco de la Energia-EVE (Spain); IBERDROLA Engineering & Construction (UK); DNV GL (UK); the University of Edinburgh (UK); the University of Exeter (UK); Kymaner (Portugal); Instituto Superior Técnico-IST (Portugal) and University College Cork (Ireland). The OPERA project has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 654444.

The 12th European Wave & Tidal Conference (EWTEC) took place from August 27th to September 1st 2017 and focused on the commercialization of the marine energy sector with 70 scientific presentations over four days. Yoshio Masuda was a former Japanese naval commander, and is regarded as the father of modern wave power technology. The Oscillating Water Column is regarded as his invention.


Note to Editors - About Global Maritime

Global Maritime specializes in marine warranty, dynamic positioning and engineering services in the offshore and marine sectors. Founded in 1979, headquartered in Stavanger and majority-owned by HitecVision, Global Maritimes services span the entire offshore project lifecycle from engineering & design, construction and third party verification through to marine warranty surveying, dynamic positioning, installation, risk management and decommissioning.