DTOcean: Optimal Design Tools for Ocean Energy Arrays

DTOcean is a European collaborative project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Development. DTOcean that stands for Optimal Design Tools for Ocean Energy Arrays aims at at accelerating the industrial development of ocean energy power generation knowledge, and providing design tools for deploying the first generation of wave and tidal energy converter arrays. It gathers 18 partners from 11 countries (Ireland, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and United States of America) under the coordination of the University of Edinburgh.

DTOcean is developing an open source numerical tool using Python and many of the libraries developed for use with Python. This talk will discuss both the academic challenges of meeting the goals of the project and the technical challenges of organising and structuring a project consisting of many geographically dispersed partners with distinct tasks, but requiring close integration to solve the global optimisation problem.