US-based wave-energy developer Atmocean (www.atmocean.com) plans to install its wave energy system off Newfoundland in Canada for a third round of ocean testing.

The company will be collaborating with the College of the North Atlantic to deploy its next-generation pump in September 2017 off the town of Lord’s Cove.

This deployment follows five rounds of wave-tank testing at Texas A&M in 2016, plus ocean tests carried out in Peru a year earlier.

Chris White, Atmocean’s COO, said: “While we are still focused on sending pressurised seawater to shore to be desalinated without grid-tied electricity, this specific test will send pressurised seawater to shore to feed a land based multi-trophic aquaculture system.

“As the world quickly moves towards aquaculture, there is a quickly emerging market to realise sustainable land-based aquaculture.”

Atmocean is developing a system that consists of buoys and pumps that uses wave power to send pressurised seawater onto shore, where it is desalinated without the use of external energy.

The system operates by using the rising and falling motion of ocean waves to drive a piston in a cylinder that pressurizes the seawater. By connecting several seawater pumps together as an array, this pressurised seawater can be sent to the onshore converters at a pressure of 180psi.

Atmocean then uses energy recovery devices (essentially spinning wheels) to boost 14% of the arriving seawater to 900psi — the pressure needed to run reverse osmosis in a system that is the size of a shipping container and is manufactured by Atmocean industry partners.