Blue Energy News and Press Releases

Blue Energy Successfully Completes Prototype Research in Collaboration with UBC

Blue Energy Canada Inc. is pleased to announce it has recently completed testing a turbine prototype at the University of British Columbia.

Over the course of several weeks in September, Blue Energy engineers, working jointly with personnel from the Mechanical Engineering department installed a turbine prototype in the university tow tank facility and completed a wide range of experimentation.

“This has been a very successful experiment for our turbine prototype and an excellent partnership,” says Blue Energy president Martin Burger. “We are all very excited to confirm data and proceed with additional future testing.”

Research data, concentrated on testing hydrodynamic flow characteristics, will be analyzed in coming weeks by UBC engineering personnel in contract with Blue Energy, in accordance with a Collaborative Research Agreement between Blue Energy and UBC’s faculty of Applied Science. The turbine prototype, based on design characteristics of the original Davis Turbine and incorporating new engineering improvements, was fabricated in July.

In addition to entering a Contractual Research Agreement with UBC for turbine development, Blue Energy previously co-funded a Research Capabilities Enhancement Project at UBC with Western Economic Diversification and the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources. This project supports the purchase and fabrication of experimental equipment to test ocean energy devices at UBC, as well as provides seed funding for the development of an Ocean Energy Centre in collaboration with the Ocean Renewable Energy Group.

UBC Principal Investigator Dr. Sander Calisal acknowledges that “Following upon the Research Capabilities Enhancement Project co-funded primarily by Western Economic Diversification and Blue Energy, we have applied the new experimental equipment to testing Blue Energy’s turbine. The system consisted of hundreds of components and worked very well. We now have a platform for testing improved versions of the turbine based on numerical models over the coming months and look forward to continue working with Blue Energy.”
     

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