On 19th of August 1986 Marcus Lehmann was born Munich, Germany and received his high school diploma from the Luitpold-Gymnasium in 2006.
Marcus wrote his final thesis in Physics about the development and consecution of a solar model race car with emphasis on photovoltaic's. He carried out his community service at the Helmholzzentrum für Umwelt und Gesundheit close to Munich in the Department of "Simulation of environmentally friendly systems". Following, Marcus studied Mechanical Engineering at the Technischen Universität München (TUM) from 2007-2013 with the concentration "renewable energies" and "systematic product development". He wrote his Bachelor thesis about the development of a solar thermal test stand at the Zentrum für Angewandte Energie Bayern durchgeführt. From 2011 to 2013 he received the double major "Technology Management“ offered by the Elitenetzwerk Bayern.
His Master's thesis "Development and Experimental Comparison of Wave Energy Converter Technologies" was carried out at the University of California, Berkeley.
One of the major challenges of the 21st century is the development of solutions that are able to provide energy for the exponential demand. It is expected that the global energy demand will double within the next 20 years. Thus, we have to provide solutions to use all locally available renewable energy resources.
Our oceans provide a vast and so far highly underutilized source of renewable energy. The London based company Carbon Trust shows in the global annual energy potential of ocean waves is estimate to be over 2000 TWh. The renowned journal MIT technology review reported in 2012: "Several prototypes for floating wave energy devices are currently investigate in front of the coast of Europe, Asia and America. But we could also harvest this energy on the bottom of the ocean - even in storm see. Professor Alam from the University of California, Berkeley suggests to install a flexible carpet at the bottom of the ocean. The carpet would be hinged to several springs and dampers and reach a power level of 6.5 kW per square meter. Now it's the time to develop a small prototype with preferably long lasting dampers and solid and flexible foils. At the same time, the impacts on the marine life and conflicts with sand and sediment transport have to be investigated."
Before the start of Marcus PhD, a first tank prototype was developed and experimentally investigated.
Goal of his PhD is to provide answers to the following questions:
1. Verification of the numerical 2- and 3-D model with experimental data.
2. Measurement of the power level of the prototype operating under realistic ocean conditions.
3. Identification of critical components in unfavorable operation conditions
4. Experimental investigation on the operation reliability under the impact of highly non linear waves
5. Investigation of the performance depending on more complex models such as frequency depended dampening
6. Influence of sediment residue on the performance of the system
7. Development, construction and testing of a pilot power plant
The research project can be structure in 3 phases:
I. Prototype development and numerical simulation
II. Wave tank scale experiments and large scale device modeling
III. Implementation and testing of pilot plant.
The PhD is supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Hoffmann from the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg.