After being selected as one of 20 semi-finalists in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wave Energy Prize competition, Oregon-based M3 Wave LLC plans to unveil its competition entry, codenamed NEXUS, in the coming months.
“We are honored to be among only 20 teams in the world who have been selected and we look forward to pushing the envelope toward the breakthrough performance that has been so elusive for earlier generations of marine renewable technologies,” said Mike Morrow, company president and CEO.
Targeted as a deep-water, high power variant of their venerable DMP/APEX technology, the submerged NEXUS system has been developed over the last 2 years using private funds. Company CTO Mike Delos-Reyes said: “The beauty of NEXUS is we enjoy an exponential increase in wave energy input to the device as we move closer to the ocean surface. This means we can get significantly more power output from the same APEX or DMP if we integrate it into a NEXUS system.”
NEXUS has no exposed mechanical or electrical components, very similar to the APEX device that M3 deployed in the Pacific Ocean off Astoria, Oregon in the summer of 2014 with support from Oregon Wave Energy Trust. The simplicity of the technology ensures straightforward scale up from lab to prototype to pilot project, the company highlighted.
M3 Wave added that it is assembling a world-class team to aid in their Wave Energy Prize entry. Dynamics modeling support will come from Oregon State University’s Northwest National Renewable Energy Center while materials and fabrication engineering will be done in collaboration with Ershigs in Ridgefield, Washington. M3 will work with FTI out of Goleta, CA to adapt their revolutionary Prognostic and Health Monitoring System into NEXUS system architecture to improve uptime and reduce maintenance costs.
More team members will be announced in September.