I’ve had the pleasure of working the past few months with Landon Mackey, PhD on a entry into the Waves to Water Prize (https://www.herox.com/wavestowater) sponsored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The charge is to use wave energy to provide desalination for coastal communities as part of the recovery process following a natural disaster. Landon and I met a number of years ago through meetings related to the NC Renewable Ocean Energy Program and share a similar outlook on engineering designs. We’ve based our design on prior work done by the SAROS team (https://sarosdesalination.wordpress.com/), which was a spinoff of a UNC Charlotte senior design project, sponsored by Fred Wagner, a Charlotte area entrepreneur. Our design, based on lessons learned during the SAROS project is the Wave Actuated Tethered Emergency Response Bouyant Reverse Osmosis System (WATERBROS). We were pleased to be selected as one of the winning teams out of the CONCEPT phase of the competition (video here) and are hard at work on the DESIGN phase submission.
