MECC_Marine Energy Collegiate Competition
This team will build a system harnessing marine energy to solve real-world challenges across coastal, maritime, and offshore markets.
Faculty Advisor:
Description:
Marine energy represents a largely untapped opportunity to support the growing blue economy and address challenges in communities that depend on the ocean. The Marine Energy Collegiate Competition challenges students to explore how marine energy can be harnessed to develop innovative, practical solutions for real-world needs, including ocean observation and navigation, aquaculture, desalination, marine transportation, and more. Teams can advance existing technologies or develop entirely new approaches to marine energy. In previous years, we have explored technologies that combine marine energy with different desalination technologies to provide sustainable resources for remote coastal communities. This includes prototypes of wave converters coupled with reverse osmosis and OTEC with membrane distillation. Successful solutions must also consider business potential, community needs, and pathways toward real-world implementation. Through engineering design, prototyping, business planning, and community outreach, the competition empowers students to develop solutions that can help accelerate the adoption of marine energy and
Prerequisites:
- Mechanical design
- Fabrication and machining
- FEA/CFD/Physics simulation (COMSOL, Ansys, etc.)
- Controls
- PTO integration
- Power electronics and management
- Experimental design
Relevant technologies:
- Renewable energy
- Electrical systems
- Fluid systems
- CAD and fabrication
- Computational modeling