| Abstract |
The title of our project “Sea Savers: Engineering Sustainable Coral Reefs” led us to question if we could create a sustainable coral reef structure to help provide habitat for marine life affected by coral loss and if it could be implemented in offshore wind farm construction. We first began this project in March of 2025 and ran our first round of experiments in April 2025. We failed to obtain conclusive results from our experiments, so we reran them in the summer of 2025. During our first trial, we tested three materials to investigate their suitability to be used in coral reef construction (recycled concrete, clay with glass shards and clay). We ran into issues such as poor aeration, material sturdiness, unsuitable water conditions, and salinity, which caused our marine organisms to fail to respond to our models. From this we were able to observe that we needed to create a more realistic marine environment. In our second trial, we used real seawater to tackle the unsuitable salinity and water conditions, proper aeration and more robust materials (recycled concrete, porous limestone and PVC, as a stand in for fibre glass wind turbine blades). We measured the abundance of marine organisms on each model over the course of one week. From our results we were able to conclude that recycled concrete and porous limestone were the most successful models. These results highlight the potential of using sustainable materials to construct artificial coral reefs in offshore wind farms to provide habitats for marine species.
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