Experimental Officer at FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility and Mechanical engineer reading for a PhD. As part of the FloWave team, I am involved in the design and undertaking of experimental projects focussing on floating wind, wave and tidal energy. My role is centred around advising clients, setting up experiments, capturing data, and packaging data sets. My PhD is investigating the impacts of combined wave-current environments on tidal stream turbines. The main aim of the project is to investigate how surface waves influence energy extraction and damage loading of tidal stream turbine rotors under steady operation.I am using a blend of numerical models to represent system behaviour to aid in device design and control. My current methodology is to use a multiphase CFD (computational fluid dynamics) solver, within which I embed an ALM (actuator line method) model to represent the turbine rotor. The project looks to more accurately benchmark performance through studying methods of constructing performance indicators Cp and Ct, and simulate rotors at varying positions in the water column under a range of combined wave-current environments. The future of the project may lead to analysis of components further down the drivetrain. The modelling is built on the OpenFOAM framework and uses other open-source developments such as olaFlow and turbinesFoam. In addition to my experience using these codes, I have become familiar with some of NREL's (National Renewable Energy Lab) software in the form of OpenFAST and SOWFA in hope of integrating some of their functionality in future.At this stage in the project, I am interested in communicating with industry on what they perceive as useful avenues of research within the scope of the work.