Water Innovation will increasingly take place in coastal regions. The first reason is population density: more than half of the world’s population live within 100 km of the sea, and 13 of the 15 largest cities are now on or near the coast. The second reason is the expansion of human activities using oceans and water bodies as vital resources for trade, transport, tourism and ecological habitats (from fishing grounds to mangrove habitats to nutrient filtering through algal beds). Climate change is affecting many coastal areas, with increased erosion, storm activity and water quality implications. Decarbonising the economy and moving toward sustainable energy sources also relies largely on marine renewable energy (wind, wave, tidal).

Coastal and ocean engineering are key areas of research and investment, and this Water Innovation and Research Centre (WIRC@Bath) Research Theme aims at federating the research undertaken at Bath, to leverage existing synergies and develop new collaborations, within the University, and with industrial and international partners.

Ongoing projects:

• Dynamic Coastal Protection: Resilience of Dynamic Revetments Under SLR (DynaRev)

• Complex effects in nonlinear free surface waves: ice, shear and electric fields

• Coastal protection and near-shore evolution under Sea Level Rise

• Low Cost Coastal Data Collection Using Citizen Science

• Use of advanced numerical simulation for future flood resilience

• Continuous real-time long term monitoring of beach erosion and recovery using LiDAR

• Active control for multi-degree-of-freedom wave energy converters

• The influence of breathing sediment on oxygen dynamics and the marine benthos

• Sound Source Verification in Offshore Prospection

• Phase preserving 3D micro-navigation for interferometric synthetic aperture sonar

• Passive Acoustic Monitoring from a Wave-Propelled Unmanned Surface Vehicle

• Deep-learning and detection of acoustic trends and transients in marine observatories

• The role of phytoplankton morphology on dominance under different turbulent regimes (PhytoMix)

Past projects:

• Mid-stage development of the CCell Wave Energy Converter

• Waves in Shallow Water (WASH)