Callum's tank tests have embarrassed more than one pretty CAD model. He is in demand among developers who have discovered that the sea is not a spreadsheet.
He is cheerful, which in marine energy is a form of heroism.
His experience is that marine energy devices rarely fail hydrodynamically. They fail at moorings, connectors, seals and retrieval — the interfaces, in other words, and usually during an operation nobody modelled because it was classed as logistics. His group has consequently spent as much effort on installation and recovery as on power capture.
He is honest about the sector's history. A great many devices have been built, deployed once and quietly recovered. The ones that survived took tank testing seriously, planned for weather windows that did not appear, and treated vessel time as the scarce resource it is.
Selected projects
Named work, with a sentence of context each.
Mooring fatigue redesign
Tank and numerical work on a mooring arrangement that had already failed once at sea, identifying a snatch loading condition that occurred only during recovery.
Array wake measurement campaign
Measured wake interaction between scaled devices at spacings a developer had assumed were sufficient, and established that two of the three proposed layouts were not.
Weather-window operability study
Built an operability model from ten years of site metocean data, which reset a deployment programme's schedule and its budget for vessel standby.
Working with Fraser
He asks for the site before the device. Metocean data, bathymetry and vessel availability determine what is possible, and a device optimised without them tends to be optimised for the wrong sea.
His tank programmes are scoped to answer specific questions with pass criteria agreed in advance, on the grounds that an ambiguous tank result is worse than none: it will be interpreted charitably by whoever paid for it.
Looking for
Developers with a device, a site, and a respect for weather windows.
Probably not for
Devices heading straight to open water without tank data. He will suggest, gently, that this has been tried.
Credits and contributions
- Test lead on more than twenty scaled marine device campaigns
- Adviser on marine operations planning for two tidal developers
- Contributor to guidance on scaled testing practice for marine energy