Watch: Maltese Engineers’ Offshore Wind Farm Innovation Among European Inventor Award Finalists
Two Maltese engineers and their team have been selected as finalists for the European Inventor Award… and you could all help them win by voting now!
Tonio Sant and Daniel Buhagiar led the development of the new technology, FLASC, a mechanical energy storage system that could make offshore wind power more reliable and predictable.
All of this, the inventors explained, is made possible because the system uses the ocean as a heat sink, allowing them to simplify mechanics and increase the efficiency of the storage and release of energy.
FLASC is particularly important in this day and age when one looks at the situation around us, and how it only seems to be getting worse.
Research by the European Environment Agency (EEA) has found that extreme weather events caused by climate change (anything from heatwaves to flooding) accounted for anywhere from 85,000 to 145,000 fatalities across Europe alone in the last 40 years. Economic losses across the continent from the effects of fossil-fuel-driven climate change could exceed €1 trillion per year soon because of heatwaves and coastal floods alone, further highlighting the importance of renewable energy resources.
That’s where Malta’s FLASC comes in, making the storage and redistribution of wind energy even easier.
Tonio Sant and Daniel Buhagiar and their team were selected from 550 candidates and are now one of three finalists in the Research category of the 2024 European Inventor Award.
The FLASC system can store significant amounts of energy in a safe and sustainable manner. Most components are deployed subsea, at the site of the wind farm. Using a liquid-piston mechanism, it transforms surplus wind-generated power into stored energy through the compression of air, with the pressurised seawater acting as a liquid piston within high-pressure tanks. The system uses the ocean itself as a heatsink, immediately taking care of one of the largest problems in storage devices of this nature.
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“During air compression in the tanks, the surrounding seawater absorbs the heat generated, effectively dissipating it without experiencing a measurable increase in temperature,” Sant explained. “When we expand the gas and generate electricity, the sea stabilises the temperature of our air to help it expand smoothly and generate electricity to meet the energy demand. This helps us to simplify the technology. Current compressed air energy storage systems use additional hardware to store the heat that is generated and avoid energy losses. We don’t need this additional heat store, we have the sea.”
During periods of low wind, this process can be reversed, releasing the hydraulic energy stored in the pressurised air to drive a turbine and generate electricity. According to the inventors, its efficiency allows 93% of all work done on the gas to be recovered, resulting in a high overall efficiency.
Developed during Buhagiar’s PhD at the University of Malta under the supervision of Professor Tonio Sant of the Mechanical Engineering Department, FLASC began as an academic challenge but grew much larger when the University’s Knowledge Transfer Office (KTO) suggested the idea was good enough to be patented.
But that’s not all – the University of Malta even created a spin-off, the FLASC B.V., with the purpose of eventually scaling up.
The other finalists recognised for outstanding work in the European Inventor Award Research field are the German Cordelia Schmid, for her AI solutions that enable advanced machine perception that closely mimics human visual interpretation and the French team led by David Devos and Caroline Moreau for their innovative treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
Malta is more than just featured in this edition’s finalists, because the tiny island will actually be hosting the European Inventor Award for the first time in history.
The European Patent Office (EPO) will announce the winners of the 2024 edition of the European Inventor Award at a ceremony on 9 July at 12.00CET, making this the first time Malta has hosted since the award was launched back in 2006.
In those 18 years, the European Inventor Award has awarded 95 inventors of more than 30 nationalities, including six Nobel Prize winners.
Voting for the prestigious European Inventor Award is open now, and you can select Malta’s Tonio Sant and Daniel Buhagiar here!
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