The Next Wave

The ocean holds vast, untapped potential: Engineers see it as a resource to store carbon and help mitigate climate change, an avenue to address food and fresh water insecurity, and a source of sustainable materials and life-saving medicines.

At Lehigh, researchers are immersed in efforts to harness its waves, tides, and currents to drive innovation in renewable energy. 

Nearly four years ago, the Atlantic Marine Energy Center (AMEC), a partnership among the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Stony Brook University, the Coastal Studies Institute, and Lehigh, began its mission to turn the vast energy of the ocean into a sustainable power source. Now, with a $12 million grant from the Department of Energy, AMEC is poised to deepen its impact—launching innovative research projects, improving infrastructure, and equipping a new generation of engineers to address the world’s energy challenges.

In total, DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office invested more than $41 million in this latest round of funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to support four university-led National Marine Energy Centers located across the country. The centers will use the funds to support research, infrastructure improvements, strategy, administration, outreach, and communications for their projects. 

The grant follows the $9.7 million that DOE awarded the four AMEC universities in 2021, which served to initially establish the center.

“This is a five-year award that will allow us to expand the scope and reach of AMEC,” says AMEC co-director Arindam Banerjee, who is Lehigh’s Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics and department chair. “And we’ll be doing that by, among other efforts, developing a series of week-long summer courses, launching new research projects, and improving our test facilities.”

“We’ll have two tiers of courses,” says Banerjee. “The first will be like a boot camp, where students will be exposed to the fundamentals of marine energy systems. It might attract, for example, a senior from any engineering major who is curious about marine energy but doesn’t want to commit to a traditional course. They’ll get a good introduction to the fundamentals and the experts, and hopefully it will help guide their decision about graduate school. The second tier of classes will be highly specialized, graduate-level courses that give students and professionals an immersive experience in a single topic within marine energy.”

A second key part of this newest grant will see Lehigh take the lead on two research projects—one focused on the structural performance of tidal turbine blades under turbulent loading, and the other on real-time stable marine energy microgrid power management for coastal communities.

“Our original AMEC team here at Lehigh consists of seven faculty members, and we’ve now added three more, all of whom are involved in these projects,” says Banerjee, who will be running the first project out of his own lab, Lehigh’s Tidal Turbulence Test Facility.

That project will involve small-scale testing of turbine blades in Banerjee’s lab followed by large-scale numerical simulations at Lehigh’s High-Performance Computing Center conducted by Parisa Khodabakshi, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics and one of the new faculty members of AMEC. Large-scale experiments will be performed at Lehigh’s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Center by Richard Sause, the Joseph T. Stuart Professor of Structural Engineering.

“Typically, experiments or simulations are done at one scale,” says Banerjee. “This is a unique study in that we’re doing experiments across scales and using simulations to serve as a bridge between them.”

The second project will attempt to integrate marine renewable energy resources, in this case, wave energy converters, into coastal microgrids. It’s a multidisciplinary effort that includes Farrah Moazeni, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; Javad Khazaei, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (both of whom are among the latest to join AMEC); and Banerjee.

“Our aim is to design a real-time, closed-loop control system for marine energy microgrids that not only optimally allocates energy resources, but also guarantees stability in the face of fluctuations and uncertainties from loads, weather, and renewable resources,” says Moazeni, who will lead the project as well as teach one of the advanced short courses. “Coastal and island communities often lack access to reliable and stable energy sources. With this grant, I hope we can take a meaningful step toward providing stable energy resources capable of withstanding the challenges posed by climate change to these vulnerable communities.”

Additionally, Lehigh will contribute data and the expertise of Muhannad Suleiman and Paolo Bocchini—both professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and members of AMEC—to several other projects led by other institutions within AMEC.