Key Research Challenge Themes
Many industry roadmaps have been developed for Offshore Renewable Energy. These roadmaps are generally on a sectoral basis (for offshore wind and marine, with wave and tidal often considered together).
To develop the area, or 'research challenges', strategy for the Supergen ORE Hub and its associated programme of Core and Flexible Fund supported research, these roadmaps have been synthesised through extensive consultation exercises with industry and other stakeholders, including the Advisory Board and Research Alignment Group.. These exercises have resulted in the identification of following key Research Challenge themes, which the Supergen ORE Hub will look to address through its Flexible Funding scheme.
Research Themes | Description |
|---|---|
A | Resource and environment characterisation |
B | Fluid structure seabed interaction |
C | Materials and manufacturing |
D | Sensing, control and electro-mechanics |
E | Survivability, reliability and design |
F | Operations, management, maintenance and safety |
G | Environmental and ecosystem aspects |
H | Marine socio-economics and governance |
The Flexible Fund will seed areas that complement existing research, fill gaps or add cross-cutting activities to explore the transfer of research findings between sectors within ORE, under the Research Theme headings as set out above. More detail of the research challenges within each of these themes can be found in our Research Landscape
See our Flexible Funding projects from previous calls below
Funding Call 4 – July 2023
For our fourth Flexible Funding call we’ve funded 10 successful awards, representing almost £970,000 of investment, of which £170,000 has been funded by Wave Energy Scotland and the ORE Catapult Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence.
See the projects
Funding Call 3 – April 2021
For our third Flexible Funding call we’ve funded 8 successful awards, representing almost £800,000 of investment. Projects include investigation into new sustainable tidal turbine blade materials, obtaining systemic long-term measurements of underwater noise from operational floating offshore wind turbines, and investigating fatigue data for flexible membrane wave energy converters amongst others.
See the projects
Funding Call 2 - March 2020
Our second Flexible Funding call was another success with over 120 applicants and 12 successful awards, representing £1.2m of investment. Awards ranged from research into "Advanced, Modular Power Take-Off Design for Marine Energy Converters" to "Improved Models for Multivariate Metocean Extremes"
See the projects
Funding Call 1 - April 2019
Our inaugural Flexible Funding call was hugely successful with over 80 applicants and 10 successful awards, representing £1m of investment. Awards ranged from research into "Autonomous Biomimetic Robot-fish for Offshore Wind Farm Inspection" to "Flow measurement for accurate tidal turbine design"
See the projects
