Maritime traffic in the Arctic region is rapidly increasing. But there has been a huge increase in marine casualties in this region due to its extremely harsh environment and the severe safety challenges for ships’ navigation teams. SEDNA will develop an innovative and integrated risk-based approach to safe Arctic navigation, ship design and operation, to enable European maritime interests to confidently fully embrace the Arctic’s significant and growing shipping opportunities, while safeguarding its natural environment. More specifically SEDNA will create and demonstrate the improved safety outcomes of: 1. The Safe Arctic Bridge, a human-centered operational environment for the ice-going ship bridge using augmented reality technology to provide improved situational awareness and decision making whilst enabling integration with new key information layers developed by the project using innovative big data management techniques. 2. Integrated dynamic meteorological and oceanographic data with real time ship monitoring and ice movement predictions to provide reliable decision making for safe and efficient Arctic voyage optimisation. 3. Anti-icing engineering solutions, using nature inspired approaches, to prevent ice formation on vessels, eliminating ice as a ship stability and working-environment hazard. 4. Risk-based design framework to ensure that vessel design is connected to all key hazards of ship operation in the Arctic. The holistic treatment of the ship design, operating regime and environment will improve safety and minimise impact over the entire life cycle. 5. A CEN Workshop Agreement on a process to systematically address safety during bunkering of methanol as a marine fuel along with safety zone guidance for three bunkering concepts: Truck to Ship, Shore to Ship and Ship to Ship. To maximise impact, SEDNA will provide formal inputs to international regulatory regimes regarding regulation adaptation requirements for its safety solutions.

This project aims to develop a framework that will integrate data collected and recorded through a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system for marine energy converters, in order to estimate reliability levels at component and system level in real time and evaluate its ability to further fulfil its intended function. Obtaining a more well-informed understanding of the actual state of the system, alternative operational strategies can be adopted, particularly taking into consideration its residual capacity after extreme environmental events, optimizing its inspection and maintenance scheduling and hence reducing the OPEX. Application of the developed framework on an existing prototype wave device, already developed by the Chinese partners, will allow its validation and extension to future applications. This reference case will be employed in order to classify its components and determine potential failure modes and limit states to assess failure. From the key failure mechanisms that will be identified, arrangements for Structural Health Monitoring will be proposed obtaining data from relevant measurements (ie strains and accelerations) that can then inform the reliability evaluation in real time, updating its operational strategy, particularly taking into consideration residual capacity after extreme environmental events. Outcome of the project will be a generic framework applicable to a range of marine energy devices.

Large scale power generation from tidal currents will require the deployment of large numbers of tidal turbines arrayed in close proximity to one another. This presents significant challenges; turbine-in-wake interactions, as well as significant opportunities; arraying turbines side-by-side in closely spaced fences can significantly enhance their performance. Extreme weather survivability and the ability to maintain offshore systems are key to delivering economic and durable tidal energy systems. A potential solution to these challenges is floating systems supporting multiple closely spaced turbines. Such systems will provide rapidly deployable, retrievable and maintainable multi-turbine systems that deliver high performance. This project will conduct a preliminary assessment and feasibility study of floating closely spaced tidal turbine arrays. Specifically the project will seek to optimize the hydrodynamic performance of multiple closely spaced turbines supported from a single platform and determine their load and response when subjected to combined wave and tidal flows. The project will also seek to determine the suitability and stability of mooring systems under such loads and the platform's static and dynamic response leading to definition of permissible operating regimes.

In the past decade, tidal stream energy converters have become a major focus for renewable energy R&D with a number of turbine farms now in its planning and development phase. The majority of existing designs for tidal energy devices utilize sea-bed mounted turbine energy converters. These underwater devices however present many challenges related to economic and technical viability in terms of their installations and maintenances cost. In recent years, a floating type tidal energy device is being developed. The installation of such a device comprises of single or multiple turbines mounted on a floating platform anchored to the sea-bed with mooring lines. Research and industry teams in China and UK have presented multiple demonstrations both on a model scale and a full scale floating tidal energy converter. All of the results add credibility to their technical feasibility and cost effective nature as compared to fixed turbines. Despite the advantages of floating tidal current turbines (FTCT) over their fixed counterparts, the existing design guidance is not deemed to be ready for the commercial market. The key challenges include guaranteeing the safety of supporting platform and floating mooring lines, the survivability of large scale rotor under extreme sea conditions, the accurate assessment for the proper site selection and the reliable evaluation of environmental impacts. Existing industry design tools rely very much on the simplified models or individual component design rules which negatively impact the energy extraction process/amount/supply. The proposed project aims to integrate the work already carried out at University of Strathclyde in UK in the field of offshore renewable energy and floating offshore structure with the work performed at (a) Harbin Engineering University in China in the area of floating tidal turbine and (b) Ocean University of China in China in the field of tidal resources and environment impacts assessment. The main goal of the proposed research is to explore whether an integrated method is feasible to better understand the fundamental physics associated with a coupled floating tidal energy system through numerical framework with experimental comparisons and validations. This would then potentially provide more accurate industry design guidelines for the future commercialized FTCTs and other floating marine energy devices.