Design optimisation and resource assessment for tidal-stream renewable energy farms using a new continuous turbine approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel continuous turbine approach for optimizing tidal stream farm designs, balancing power output, profit, and installation costs through efficient mathematical modeling and simulation.

Contribution

It presents a new continuous turbine density method constrained by shallow water equations, enabling complex, multi-farm optimization with practical installation considerations.

Findings

Optimized turbine placement and farm configurations in the Pentland Firth.

Demonstrated simultaneous optimization of multiple tidal farms.

Analyzed interactions between neighboring tidal farms.

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for optimising the design of tidal stream turbine farms. In this approach, the turbine farm is represented by a turbine density function that specifies the number of turbines per unit area and an associated continuous locally-enhanced bottom friction field. The farm design question is formulated as a mathematical optimisation problem constrained by the shallow water equations and solved with efficient, gradient-based optimisation methods. The resulting method is accurate, computationally efficient, allows complex installation constraints, and supports different goal quantities such as to maximise power or profit. The outputs of the optimisation are the optimal number of turbines, their location within the farm, the overall farm profit, the farm's power extraction, and the installation cost. We demonstrate the capabilities of the method on a validated numerical model of the Pentland Firth, Scotland. We optimise the design of four tidal farms simultaneously, as well as individually, and study how farms in close proximity may impact upon one another.