Cloud-based simulation of tidal farms
Active Eon is a French SME which markets software products supporting the provision of Cloud-based services. Electricity production from marine tidal farms has a great potential for tapping into green energy from the ocean. However, such farms are difficult to design. The actual production of energy depends strongly on many factors: ocean variability, tidal cycles, local effects, turbine geometries, effects due to arrays of devices and turbulence. The effective and affordable simulation of such systems needs requires a Cloud-based-HPC solution. Active Eon plans to provide a service for such simulations where software and hardware are made available through a pay-per-use one-stop shop.
Metocean Analytics is the first on-demand metocean study on offer. It is a web platform developed by Open Ocean, an SME based in France, for use in the placement of undersea turbines in tidal electricity farms. The platform is utilised during the feasibility phase of tidal farm development and provides studies of meteorological and oceanographic conditions, in order to allow developers to determine the size and placement of turbines.
The next step is to enable tidal farm developers to evaluate the electricity production of a potential tidal farm configuration. Turbines in tidal farms must be placed very carefully, and machine-to-machine interaction must be considered, as production from one turbine can be affected by the wake of other turbines. The wake around a tidal farm is also constantly changing with the tide. This makes it both very difficult and extremely important to be able to accurately simulate tidal flow when designing these farms.
The goal of this experiment was therefore to create and deploy a Cloud-based HPC solution for on-demand tidal farm simulation, and add this product to the existing Metocean Analytics platform. From a variety of user-defined inputs such as: turbine locations and characteristics, farm location, and time period, this new tool will produce an estimate of the energy production of the simulated tidal farm. A report will also be generated providing detailed characteristics at each turbine location.
Success Story Video
Participating Partners:
End User: Open Ocean SAS
HPC Service Provider: Active Eon
HPC Centre: Bull