"Getting to the point I’m at now with my project hasn’t been straight forward – I had a few false starts along the way and working in a small organisation with limited resources isn’t easy. However, I have finished up with a really interesting project that has the potential to make a significant difference to my sponsors’ business, and the support from IDCORE has been immense throughout.”

After graduating, Ailsa had planned to take a year out to go travelling, but the COVID pandemic put an end to those plans. Instead, she spent the year working in a distillery alongside a group of engineers who were commissioning an anaerobic digestor. It was this, combined with her passion for mitigating climate change, and her experience on a final year undergraduate project on solar cells, that developed her interest in the renewables sector.

Katie has been sponsored by the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility (FloWave), a wave and current simulation tank which is a part of the University of Edinburgh. FloWave offers hydrodynamic testing services that support the development of offshore renewable energy technologies. Her project combines aspects of both numerical modelling and tank testing.

Bryn first started to explore renewable energy during his first degree, an MEng in Mechanical Engineering at Swansea University. There is interest in the potential development of a tidal lagoon in the Swansea Bay area, and this meant that Bryn was able to study modules on both lagoon and tidal energy, as well as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as part of his first degree. Coming to IDCORE allowed him to continue to pursue these interests to a deeper level but within the commercial context provided by an EngD.

Ione came to IDCORE thinking that she would like to work on a sustainability project in offshore wind. However, as happens for many participants in the programme, her ideas changed during the first year as she started to learn more about the sector as a whole. She is now working at FastBlade investigating the potential for manufacturing tidal turbine blades from recyclable materials.