Advancing marine renewable energy monitoring capabilities

Marine renewable energy is poised to contribute substantially to electricity generation over the coming decades. Marine resources are abundant, but generation options must harness these resources in an economically-competitive manner at acceptable environmental and societal cost. This economic pressure also applies equally to the environmental monitoring of early demonstration projects that is needed to reduce risk uncertainty and inform sustainable commercial developments. Consequently, a new suite of flexible, yet cost-effective, capabilities are required. This thesis presents applied research underpinning the development of the Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP) and Millennium Falcon deployment vehicle, a system that can widen the aperture of the observable environmental interactions at wave and current energy sites.;The AMP and Millennium Falcon deployment vehicle provide a cabled, yet reconfigurable, instrumentation platform. By incorporating a flexible suite of instrumentation into a shrouded body with a single wet-mate connection, the AMP has the power and data bandwidth afforded to cabled deployments, but maintains the ease of recovery and redeployment associated with autonomous packages. Instrumentation included in the initial AMP implementation allows for monitoring of marine animal interactions, noise levels, current profiles, turbulence, and water quality in the near field of marine energy converters. The Millennium Falcon deployment vehicle, along with the docking station and launch platform, provides the support infrastructure for deployment and recovery of the AMP in the energetic conditions that are typical of marine energy sites. Future potential for instrument integration and algorithm development makes the AMP well-suited to face the evolving needs of environmental monitoring around marine energy converters.;Development of the AMP and deployment system requires several pieces of new knowledge across the spectrum of ocean engineering. First, because the instrumentation mix defines the envelope for subsequent hydrodynamic optimization, the size and spacing constraints of the instruments needs to be defined. However, prior to this thesis, the utility of optical cameras to provide quantitative information in tidal energy environments had not been established, nor had the practical constraints on camera-light separation beneath the photic zone. Without this information, the benefits of including an optical camera system in an instrumentation package are uncertain. Consequently, the initial investigation focused on developing and evaluating the performance of a new stereo-optical camera system. With this sub-system defined, hydrodynamic analysis and optimization could proceed, through a series of laboratory experiments and vehicle simulations. These suggests that a deployment system built around the capabilities of a low-cost inspection class ROV can be effective, even in energetic environments. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).