In order to address the growing demand for energy, methods are being developed to extract power from the ocean in the form of waves, currents, temperature differences, and salinity. The marine energy industry has faced many technical challenges around deploying devices in the corrosive, high-energy marine environment, but has made significant progress over the years. To make this learning accessible and help progress the industry, Tethys Engineering was created to archive documents around the technical and engineering development of marine energy devices.
Named after the Greek titaness of the sea, Tethys Engineering was developed in 2019 by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to support the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Water Power Technologies Office. Tethys Engineering was developed as a sister website to Tethys, which explores the environmental effects of the marine industry. Tethys Engineering fits within a larger framework of databases supporting marine energy development known as PRIMRE, which aims to increase accessibility and discoverability of information in order to advance the adoption of marine energy technologies.
The primary content within Tethys Engineering are documents (both peer-reviewed and grey literature) which are actively collected and curated by a team of researchers at PNNL from a variety of sources. Members of the community are also encouraged to contribute to Tethys Engineering by identifying documents not yet in the collection. Where possible by copyright, Tethys Engineering will provide access to documents by uploaded PDFs. All content can be easily sorted and filtered on the Knowledge Base and Map Viewer databases.
Tethys Engineering provides some additional resources that are meant to support progress with the marine energy industry. These include: (1) an event calendar that tracks upcoming conferences, workshops, and webinars; (2) a photo library that hosts photos of marine energy devices and facilities that are available for free, third-party use; (3) a list of organizations who are actively involved in research around marine energy, sorted by number of publications; (4) a list of databases that supplement Tethys Engineering; and (5) contact information for other registered members within Tethys Engineering who have opted to share their information (only accessible while logged in).
Tethys Engineering Development Platform
Tethys Engineering has been developed using Drupal, supporting a “smart” database that has certain advantages over standard databases. Tethys Engineering draws on many years of software and systems development from the PNNL Drupal Development Team, allowing users to semantically search and organize data through tagging individual files, documents, and multimedia products. Tethys Engineering is monitored and all content is quality assured and curated to ensure that content is current and accurate. Feedback and suggestions from users are actively encouraged, as website functionality and content are routinely added based on user input.