RealTide Project Deliverables

The RealTide publicly available deliverables can be accessed via this page. The deliverables will be uploaded, by work package, as they are issued during the course of the project.

Work Package 1

Increased reliability of tidal rotors

The deliverables associated with this work package seek to identify and characterize potential reliability issues for tidal turbines. Analysis will particularly focus on fatigue assessment and testing for composite tidal blades. Recommended mitigation measures for identified failure modes will be incorporated into other elements of the RealTide project.

Work Package 2

Realistic Tidal Environment

Complex velocity fields drive tidal energy converter loadings. These affect fundamental device design, reliability and ultimately energy conversion rate and yield. This complex flow exhibits spatial and temporal variation at scales significant to tidal energy: meters (blades) to kilometers (machine arrays) and seconds (turbulence) to months (energy yield and extreme loads). This work package seeks to develop measurement technology for marine renewable energy applications and enhance data management and analysis to facilitate industry’s exploitation of the data

Work Package 3

Realistic Simulation of Tidal Turbines

Accurately modelling the hydro- and electro-dynamic loads on the rotor and the response of a single tidal energy converter requires a fully bi-directional model of the tidal current conversion system from the hydrodynamic forces on the rotor to the network.  Such a model can easily be extended to a tidal farm by including the collector cables and any substations as well as the export cable and grid connection. This work package will implement such a generalised model which is able to operate either as a free standing design tool or embedded in a computational fluid dynamics solver. This model will be used to examine design cases and to predict loads acting on the blades, generator, seals, bearings and shaft of the Sabella turbine, generating information which will be incorporated into other elements of the RealTide project.

Work Package 4

Advanced monitoring strategies

This work package seeks to define and implement advanced monitoring techniques to provide highly reliable subsystems for the key elements of tidal turbines including the prime mover, blades and the key power train components.  This will result in an integrated Condition Monitoring System (hardware and software together with a Monitoring Protocol) to acquire data from the critical subcomponents of a Tidal Energy Converter.

Work Package 5

Novel and advanced components

The large uncertainties which exist in our understanding of the environmental conditions to which tidal turbines will be exposed, has resulted in the application of extreme load conditions assumptions and high safety factors to the design of the first tidal energy converter demonstrators. This work package seeks to optimize the design and improve the reliability of the main components of the next generation turbine’s rotor, using more detailed and realistic environmental input data.

Work Package 6

Project management and dissemination

A workshop was held as part of the project's dissemination and exploitation strategy. The workshop is written up in the following report.

  • Workshop report