DTOceanPlus (2018-2021) with a total budget of 8 million euros, has developed and demonstrated a suite of second-generation advanced design tools for the selection, development, and deployment of ocean energy systems.
The consortium was formed to bring together representatives of all key user and stakeholder groups and developers of Europe’s leading ocean energy subsystems, devices, and arrays. Two US institutions also took part in the project. Users of the DTOcean+ suite of tools will be able to generate designs for innovative ocean energy technologies and deployments. These designs are optimised for a wide variety of key metrics including lifetime costs, reliability, availability, maintainability, survivability, performance, environmental impact and socio-economic impact. They also balance technological and financial risk which, in combination with greatly improved cost effectiveness, ensure that ocean energy technologies become significantly more commercially attractive.
The functional requirements of the software suite were developed considering both the expectations of potential users, identified during a consultation phase, and the functionalities not covered by the various tools available on the market. Feedback from the DTOcean project has also proved very valuable. Standalone versions of the different tools were first developed: the core functionality of each individual tool or module was complete and could run independently. In order to provide additional valuable results to the users, the whole software was integrated and data flow between modules were optimised. Then, real scenarios were run by the industrial partners of the project demonstrating the applicability of the tools to concept generation and selection, technology development, farm deployment and optimisation. The final public release of the open-source software will be at the end of August 2021. To support the future users in their various uses of the suite, project partners are preparing tutorials and user guides that will be released at the same time.
DTOceanPlus partners:
Tecnalia University of Edinburgh Energy Systems Catapult Wave Energy Scotland France Energies Marines WavEC Offshore Renewables Aalborg Universitet Enel Green Power Bureau Veritas IDOM Oceantec Nova Innovation CorPower Ocean Open Cascade Energias de Portugal Orbital Marine Power Sabella Sandia National Laboratories National Renewable Energy Laboratory
By Jake Frith
