The Sound of Islay: very high resolution CFD modelling for tidal energy site assessment (£24,848)

Internal pooled NERC IAA award of £24848 to develop and validate a very high-resolution, tidal simulation of the Sound of Islay, to facilitate the efficient, robust placement of tidal turbines at proposed tidal farm sites. Ultimately, this will lead to uncertainty/cost reduction in tidal farm deployment. This project will utilise cutting-edge computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, and capture the turbulent flow within the Sound at a level of detail currently unavailable in commonly used tidal packages such as MIKE3 and TELEMAC. This will be in collaboration with Scottish Power Renewables (SPR), and the Scottish Association for Marine Sciences (SAMS). SPR are developing the world’s first full-scale tidal turbine array at the Sound of Islay; SPR will supply their previous on-site measurements, and in return Edinburgh will report back our findings of the simulations to SPR. SAMS have extensive knowledge of the physical oceanography of Western Scotland, and will support this work with staff and data resources.