MAT4OEC, a project led by CTC, will test its developments at four sites in Europe

Representatives of the CTC Technology Centre, accompanied by members of the consortium that develops the MAT4OEC project, visited the SmartBay Ireland facilities during the third follow-up meeting of this European initiative.

During this meeting, they were able to get a further insight into all the facilities offered by the Irish infrastructure to study the behaviour of the developments generated in this research. SmartBay Ireland is an international benchmark test site aimed at promoting the development of innovative products and services for the maritime sector. In this case, it will allow the researchers in the consortium to obtain a set of data which will then be cross-checked with data collected in other European marine laboratories.

The coatings will be tested in two reference test sites such as SmartBay and the Marine Corrosion Test Site El Bocal, located on the Cantabrian coast. They will also be tested in the waters of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The analysis of the information gathered in each of the study sites will optimise the results of this project led by CTC, which aims to respond to part of the real needs of any structure located in the environment.

In addition to visiting the SmartBay facilities, this progress meeting means the halfway point in the execution of the project. In this sense, the main advances made by the project participants since the previous session, held in Edinburgh last March, have been presented. As the leader of the consortium, CTC acts as the driving force for the other partners and also as a supervisor to ensure the planned developments are executed promptly.

MAT4OEC is research with a 1.1-million-euro budget framed within the 2016 edition of OCEANERA-NET; an Era-Net initiative of the European Research Area Network funded by the European Commission, dedicated explicitly to boosting innovation in the ocean energy sector.

The projects are financed through the Regional Development Agencies of each of the partners participating in the project. In the case of CTC and DEGIMA, the financing comes from Sociedad para el Desarrollo Regional de Cantabria, S.A. (Sodercan).