The Performance Assessment of Wave and Tidal Array Systems (PerAWaT) project, launched in October 2009 with £8m of ETI investment. The project delivered validated, commercial software tools capable of significantly reducing the levels of uncertainty associated with predicting the energy yield of major wave and tidal stream energy arrays. It also produced information that will help reduce commercial risk of future large scale wave and tidal array developments.
This deliverable provides a comparison between the numerical model of the Pentland Firth developed by EDF and that developed by University of Oxford.
The models show good agreement in the tidal dynamics outside of Pentland Firth.
Each model uses different parameters for seabed coefficient resulting in small differences within the Pentland Firth.
There are significant differences in the way the tides are modelled making it difficult to compare predicted power using different turbine configurations
There is insufficient field data available to determine which model is better reproducing the real tidal dynamics.
There appears to be general agreement as to the magnitude of the powers each of the models are producing.
However, a detailed comparison of the differing methodologies for the implementation of tidal turbines is difficult because of the differences in the modelling of the tidal dynamics within the Pentland Firth.
