Design and development of the Tidal Tools software platform for the digital modelling of hydrokinetic turbines

Tidal Tools is a software platform for the digital modelling of hydrokinetic turbines that produce renewable energy from marine currents and river flows. The platform includes computational tools for geometry manipulation of turbine blades and nacelle and automated generation of computational grids, for the prediction of turbine performance in uniform flow and in unsteady flow conditions. An automated procedure allows to perform the hydrodynamic design of a new turbine with user's imposed objectives and constraints. The energy production is a given marine or river site can be estimated, and the economic sustainability of a site exploitation project can be performed by a simple techno/economic model with user defined parameters. All the tools have been developed at CNR-INM, the Institute of Marine Engineering (formerly INSEAN) of the National Research Council of Italy. Users' access to the computational tools is simple and fast thrrough graphical interfaces for input data assignment and for the analysis of results by interactive diagrams and data reports. Online help documents and tutorials are available. The platform is designed for remote access by using a common internet browser. The user can organized his/her activity in projects and sub-projects, and have access to databases for input data upload and storage of results. The platform architecture is developed in Python (DJango, Pandas), Javascript, html, CSS, and computational solvers in Fortran90.