Sunday Times 2
Dr Ranjith Obeyesekera awarded outstanding Finalist awards by Australian space industry
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Dr R Obeyesekera
Dr Ranjith Obeyesekera, a wave energy expert, was recently awarded outstanding Finalist awards in The Innovator, The Engineer, The Scientist, and The Research and Development project (2023) categories by the Australian space industry at the Australian space summit. He has several international patents in wave energy turbines and for cost effective, relocatable, self-controlled dual axis solar trackers for solar farms, and residential solar.
The judges comprised astronauts, defence personnel, university professors, Aerospace chairmen, directors and CEOs in various companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and many others.
Dr Obeyesekera created the lunar rover for regolith mining, which can move on craters and difficult areas of the moon surface, and transporting the regolith back to earth for establishing a regolith refining facility in Australia for commercial purposes. The design is now in the process of patent registering. He has expertise in designing drilling machinery for the oil and gas industry.
Dr Obeyesekera was a senior lecturer in machine designing at the University of Peradeniya and served as director of research for the Faculty of Engineering.
While he was in Sri Lanka, he engaged in renewable energy projects, specifically ocean energy power conversion into electricity.
He introduced several wave energy projects in University of Michigan, USA and wrote wave energy curriculum, as well as helped develop wave energy commercial projects in USA.
He was invited to develop a wave energy turbine in Australia. He innovated the special mechanism to reduce 100s of moving parts of the turbine into one piece which regulates all the blades. This design is patented worldwide.