About

Who we are

Marine Materials Ireland Ltd. is a company which was established to develop technology for floating offshore wind energy. We are based in Inverin, Galway on the west coast of Ireland.

Our aim

The floating offshore wind industry is growing. Full scale tests have been carried out by the market leaders, but significant design improvements are required to achieve cost reductions to allow the industry to compete with fossil fuels. Marine Materials Ireland aims to develop a novel, cost-effective solution to address this challenge. We have designed a novel floating offshore wind turbine and aim to develop a prototype to evaluate the concept. Following performance characterisation of the concept, Marine Materials Ireland aims to enter the market with a multi-megawatt wind turbine design.

Team

Dr Tomas Flanagan – CEO

Dr Tomás Flanagan has a PhD from the University of Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, focused on design project planning and management with special emphasis on simulation and risk analysis. He previously worked in roles as Turnaround Project Manager at BP Norway and Offshore Construction team lead in BP Angola. He has also held roles in change management and in-house consulting within BP.

Tomás has managed over €10M of research funding and is the principal investigator for the €2.7M H2020 FTI Powderblade project on wind energy and the €4M CRIMSON project on tidal energy.

Tomas has amassed vast experience in the design and manufacture of wind and tidal blades from composite materials.

Dr Brian Mannion – CTO

Brian Mannion joined Marine Materials Ireland in 2018 and led the Eureka Seawind and DeepWindDemo projects, designing and optimising the MMI technology in the process. Prior to joining Marine Materials Ireland, Brian was the lead design engineer for GKinetic Energy where he was responsible for the experimental and numerical performance characterisation of their novel tidal turbine, being heavily involved in successful SEAI Prototype Development Fund and Marinet 2 applications, in which he was the lead.

Simultaneously to this, he completed a PhD at the National University of Ireland Galway, which focused on a novel vertical axis tidal turbine – experimental testing of scale devices and numerical modelling. The primary aims of the work were: (1) to assess the mechanical power extraction performance of the turbine via experimental testing and (2) to develop state-of-the-art hydrodynamic models capable of accurately predicting the power performance and be used to optimise the device.