Renewable energy systems sited in the marine environment pose unique design and operational challenges. Wave energy converters must be configured to have a high response to large hydrodynamic loads, while floating wind turbines must be designed to limit the response to such wave regimes.

A new open-source numerical toolkit is now available to simulate the response of floating energy structures under realistic marine conditions in order to optimize system design. The simulation strategy developed by HR Computational fluid dynamics can be used to provide an accurate simulation of the response of complex offshore floating structures under realistic sea states, including extreme weather conditions. Source: HR WallingfordWallingford and the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory encompasses computational fluid dynamics using Proteus open-source software, and multi-body dynamics using the Chrono open-source solver.

At each time step, Proteus computes the forces from the fluid acting on the rigid body necessary to find its displacement with Chrono, which will be used as boundary conditions for mesh motion. Verification and validation cases demonstrating the utility of this approach included wave sloshing in a tank, floating body dynamics under free and wave-induced motion for different degrees of freedom, and mooring dynamics using beam element theory coupled with rigid body dynamics and collision detection.