Our Journey: Advancing Wave-Powered Desalination
From concept to real-world deployment, Water Bros has continuously refined its technology through rigorous testing and competition. Our progress through the Waves to Water Prize and key industry conferences highlights our commitment to secure, reliable, and local freshwater solutions.
Explore our timeline to see how our innovation has evolved.
Inspiration
A University of North Carolina at Charlotte design project and later IndieGoGo campaign called “Surge Actuated Reverse Osmosis” SAROS provided some of the original inspiration for the Water Bros Concept. The prior team and UNC Charlotte were both pleased to have Water Bros continue to build on the early foundations of the SAROS Project.
Waves to Water CONCEPT Stage
The initial concept for the WATER BROS device was proposed in the Fall of 2019 at the introduction of the Department of Energy Water Power Technology Office’s “Wave to Water Prize.”
Waves to Water DESIGN Stage
The Design stage focused on computer-aided design (CAD), and simulation through WECSim and Simulink/Simscape to design the components, subsystems, and full system and model performance.
Waves to Water ADAPT Stage
Throughout the ADAPT Stage the team developed several small-scale pathfinder prototypes of the device to test hydrodynamic stability and the function of the point absorber power takeoff (PTO)
Waves to Water CREATE Stage
During the Create Stage, the team leveraged the TEAMER Program to facilitate Wave tank testing of an early-stage prototype for full-scale hydrodynamic stability, PTO certification, and model validation.
Waves to Water DRINK Stage
In April 2022, the four finalist teams from the DOE Waves to Water Prize along with experts from NREL, DOE, and the Coastal Studies Institute convened in Nag Head North Carolina to deploy 4 wave-powered desalination devices in a single day.
Conference Presentations
Following deployment of the full-scale prototype device at Jennette’s Pier in Nags Head, North Carolina, USA. the Water Bros Desalination team presented on the challenges and lessons learned preparing for and during a wave energy converter deployment at the 2022 UMERC METS OREC Conference in Portland, Oregon, USA.
July 2023 Marine Energy System Innovation at Sea Funding
In July 2023, the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technology Office announced that Water Bros Desal was selected as one of 7 projects to accelerate the development and testing of marine energy technologies. These investments (nearly $10 million across all 7 projects) advance research on wave-powered technology for use in seawater desalination and support a feasibility study for a potential ocean current test facility. The selected projects focus on proving robust and reliable designs of wave-powered desalination systems, developing and validating novel components in wave-powered desalination systems, supporting advancements in marine energy desalination more broadly, and evaluating the feasibility of establishing an ocean current testing facility to share testing costs across many developers and reduce barriers to testing.