The PhD stipend is affiliated with the research project Structural Design of Wave Energy Devices funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research. At present, the wave energy sector is not able to compete economically with other renewable technologies. However, it has the potential to become a major contributor of energy worldwide and this project will further Denmark’s position as one of the leaders in wave energy research.

The Structural Design of Wave Energy Devices project (SDWED) is an international research alliance which over a five-year period aims to harness the energy potential in wave energy at competitive costs. The perspective of the project is to develop design tools and a common design basis for wave energy devices in order to make them more reliable as well as economically competitive.



The main innovation of the project is an objective of developing a wave-to-wire model which will be able to generate structural design specifications based on parameters related to hydrodynamics, power take-off and moorings. This has the potential of drastically lowering the cost of energy produced while at the same time increasing the reliability of wave energy devices.

This PhD stipend is one of four funded through the SDWED research project (two are placed with Aalborg University and the others are placed with the Technical University of Denmark and University of Bologna). The focus of the here posted stipend is on the reliability of wave energy devices. This includes reliability of both structural and non-structural components as well as system reliability and risk assessment.