“This is a really exciting opportunity as we bring our department’s core competence in hydrodynamics and control to the hydrokinetic energy area,” said Project Lead Investigator and Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Department Chair Jing Sun.

The proposed RAFT concept, made up of multiple micro-turbines, has a modularized architecture with reconfigurable units, making it adaptable to different applications and marine environments. The innovative new turbine designs, along with distributed load control and regulator concepts, significantly reduce the levelized cost of energy. In – situ real-time optimization-based control and distributed continuous system health monitoring optimize RAFT’s features to achieve performance, resiliency, reliability, and cost targets. Multidisciplinary engineering efforts with extensive modeling, iterative optimization, control co-design, and experimental validations will mitigate identified technical risks.

The University of Michigan received this competitive award from ARPA-E’s Submarine Hydrokinetic And Riverine Kilo-megawatt Systems (SHARKS) program, to develop new designs for economically competitive Hydrokinetic Turbines (HKT) for tidal and riverine currents.

Working with partners and leveraging ARPA-E’s technology-to-market apparatus, the project can contribute to effective solutions for marine renewable energy across a wide spectrum of deployments.