Marine Renewable Energy Laboratory

The Marine Renewable Energy Laboratory (MRELab) is a laboratory facility dedicated to designing and testing schools of cylinders for hydrokinetic energy conversion. It has pioneered this effort worldwide and has developed a powerful arsenal of tools to study this area from the fundamental issue of multi-body synergistic hydrodynamics to the practical aspect of increasing energy conversion.

The MRELab has a recirculating tank dedicated to the testing and optimization of the Oscylator technology. The tank is a two-story tall facility, with a 20HP motor circulating 10,000 gallons of water at up to 1.5m/s (3 knots). The tank is capable of testing the interaction of up to four cylinders at a time. The cylinder interaction is tested with varying mass, spring stiffness, damping, and flow speed. The lab also includes laser visualization of the fluid interaction.

The MRELab also performs computer simulations of the operation of the Oscylator devices with dedicated computational fluid dynamics.