Deliverable D5.3 “Energy Capture Tools – alpha version” of the DTOceanPlus project includes the details of the Deployment Design Tools module: “Energy Capture” (EC), and it presents the result of the work developed during the tasks T5.2 and T5.4 of the project. This document serves as the technical manual of the alpha version of the EC module, including all the data requirements, main functions, interfaces and all the pertinent technical details describing the alpha version of the module for the Energy Capture (EC) of an array of wave energy converter (WEC) or tidal energy converter (TEC).
This document describes the use cases and the functionalities of the EC module. This module is built to be used as a standalone tool or within the framework of design tools of the DTOceanPlus project. Its main outputs are the gross energy production of the array and of the individual machines, the power conversion efficiency of the array and the machines, and a farm layout for the deployment of the array. The calculation of those outputs can be done at three different stages of complexity for both TEC and WEC arrays. The implementation of the functionalities is described within this document.
The Business Logic, i.e. the actual functions of the EC module, has been developed in Python 3. The code is provided with an Application Programming Interface (API), developed following the Open API specifications. A basic Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the EC module was developed using Vue.js, allowing the user to interact easily with the module, inputting data and visualizing the results.
The Business Logic of the code was verified through the implementation of unit tests, guaranteeing easy maintainability for future developments of the tool. The preliminary tests and verifications performed are presented. A section of this report is dedicated to examples, showing the capabilities of the tool for the wave and tidal energy converters at various levels of complexity.