Aquantis

Founded in 2011, Aquantis was formed to develop and commercialize marine current turbines. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, the Aquantis team comprises technology and business professionals working in partnership with the National Laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy and with the U.S. Navy.

Since 2012, Aquantis and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) have collaborated on ocean turbine design, drawing on MHI’s leadership in building submarines, unmanned underwater vehicles, and offshore oil and gas facilities.

Aquantis has signed a berth agreement for a six-month testing programme in 2023 at EMEC’s Shapinsay Sound scale test site.

Aquantis’ Tidal Power Tug is a second generation floating tidal energy converter. The versatile spar-buoy platform supports a 10-meter diameter, two-bladed variable-pitch rotor and 160 kW drivetrain. By testing at EMEC’s scale test site, Aquantis will gain experience of marine operations, while generating performance data to validate its loading and dynamics model, controller functionality and load mitigation techniques.

EMEC will support Aquantis’ testing with tidal resource monitoring and the provision of its Test Support Buoy enabling remote communications with the device, data relay via EMEC’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system and safe dissipation of power generated on site.

EMEC will also provide project management, operations, consenting, monitoring and performance testing support.

The demonstration of Aquantis’ Tidal Power Tug is supported by the Interreg North-West Europe’s Ocean DEMO project, led by EMEC. The tidal turbine is being developed via the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) SHARKS (Submarine Hydrokinetic And Riverine Kilo-megawatt Systems) program.

Related news:

• May 2022: Aquantis signs up to EMEC tidal demo