THE LOCKHEED MARTIN OCEAN THERMAL ENERGY CONVERSION (OTEC) COLD WATER PIPE

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion can exploit natural temperature gradients in the oceans to generate usable forms of energy (for example, cost-competitive baseload electricity in tropical regions such as Hawaii) free from fossil fuel consumption and global warming emissions.

The #1 acknowledged challenge of constructing an OTEC plant is the Cold Water Pipe (CWP), which draws cold water from 1000m depth up to the surface, to serve as the coolant for the OTEC Rankine cycle. For a commercial-scale plant, the CWP is on the order of 10m in diameter.

This presentation will describe work done by LMSSC developing the CWP for LM MS2 New Ventures' emerging OTEC business. The work started in 2008 deciding on the minimum-cost CWP architecture, materials, and fabrication process (building an integral CWP down into the water directly from the OTEC platform). It then proceeded to a successful small-scale Proof-of-Principles validation of the innovative fabrication process, at the Engineering Development Lab in Sunnyvale. During 2009-10, under a Cooperative Agreement with the US Dept. of Energy, key elements of the process and apparatus were successfully validated at a 4m diameter scale suitable for a future OTEC Pilot Plant. The validations include assembly of sandwich core rings (shown here) from hollow pre-pultruded "planks," accurate machine-based dispensing of overlapping strips of thick fiberglass fabric to form the lengthwise-continuous face sheets, and stepwise resin infusion/cure of 4m diameter workpieces, successfully obtaining a non-discernable knitline between successive infusions.

Speaker: Dr. Alan Miller, who has operated at the interface of mechanical engineering and materials science for 45 years, is a senior staff materials engineer at LMSSC-ATC. Following 15 years as a Research Professor at Stanford, his work at LM has focussed on low-cost methods for fabricating fiber composite structures, solutions for dissimilar materials CTE problems, and other challenging mechanical and materials needs. Dr. Miller has a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Cornell and Stanford, and a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford.