Martin Wosnik
Director
Atlantic Marine Energy Center
University of New Hampshire
Friday, Apr. 11, 2025, 3:10pm
Chase 105
Abstract
The marine energy resource (wave, tidal) is significant and complements land-based renewable energy sources. An overview of the activities at the Atlantic Marine Energy Center (AMEC) will be given and select examples and results from our marine energy research at UNH will be presented.
The Atlantic Marine Energy Center (AMEC) is a national marine energy center, sponsored by the Department of Energy. AMEC is a university-led consortium between the University of New Hampshire (lead), Lehigh University, Stony Brook University, and the Coastal Studies Institute. AMEC partners and collaborates with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the European Marine Energy Center on specific tasks. AMEC’s mission is to advance marine energy solutions to power the blue economy through interdisciplinary research and education, innovation, testing, industry engagement, and community outreach.
Current research projects under AMEC at UNH include estuary scale modeling and field measurements for digital twinning, modeling and testing of “reference model” wave energy converters for blue economy applications, improving the performance of UNH’s wave-powered water pump, improving the design of mooring systems for marine energy, and assessing marine energy systems for microgrids in island communities.
In tidal energy conversion research, UNH researchers conduct experiments with both cross-flow turbine (CFT) and axial flow-turbine (AFT) configurations, with large laboratory scale models (D=1m) and field scale turbines (D=3m) at an open-water test site in an energetic tidal estuary, measuring performance, loads, blade strain and turbine wakes. We developed actuator line-models (ALM) for CFTs within a Large-Eddy Simulation framework.
In a collaborative project on digital twinning of tidal energy sites, UNH researchers developed a nested estuarine-scale modeling system for the Great Bay Estuary (GBE), which contains the UNH-AMEC Tidal Energy Test Site. It can characterize environmental conditions under realistic forcing conditions, and provides the inflow conditions for finer-scale engineering CFD models (LES).
In wave energy research, we conducted an ocean test for a UNH-designed wave-powered water pump for upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water for aquaculture. This provided key performance data for validation of a numerical model, which enabled further device improvement, techno-economic modeling and research on key technical challenges.
Bio
Martin Wosnik is a Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) and the Director of the Atlantic Marine Energy Center (AMEC), a National Marine Renewable Energy Center funded by the Department of Energy.
Dr. Wosnik conducts research in fluid dynamics and energy systems, with an emphasis on ocean renewable energy including tidal, wave and offshore wind energy. Dr. Wosnik leads a group of passionate graduate students and engineers who are working hard on harnessing the energy of the ocean.
Dr. Wosnik received a B.S. equivalent in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a Ph.D. in Mechanical
