The development of tidal stream energy presents a significant opportunity for the UK with a power generation potential in excess of 6GW nationally, and greater than 150GW globally. Delivering on net-zero and climate change objectives will require development and exploitation of all renewable energy resources to provide a robust and secure energy supply. The predictability of the tidal resource is a key benefit that can substantially contribute to resilient energy networks and complement less predictable renewable energy sources, e.g. wind, wave and solar. The UK currently leads tidal stream technology and science development, and there is significant opportunity to ensure global leadership of this exciting emerging sustainable energy sector. To date, the largest tidal device installed is 2MW and the largest array of devices is 6MW in Orkney and Pentland Firth respectively. Device technologies, marine infrastructure, deployment, and operational strategies have all been refined through industrial research, design and deployment at testing sites, assisted by university partnerships. The challenge now faced by the industry is to understand how to deliver tidal stream energy at a scale that will make a meaningful energy contribution. The solution hinges on the ability to deliver reliable, sustainable, scalable and affordable engineering solutions. The engineering challenge is complex and multi-faceted, and the importance of and sensitivity to design drivers are not always well understood. CoTide's research vision is to develop and demonstrate holistic integrated tools and design processes for tidal stream energy that will significantly reduce costs by removing unnecessary redundancy and improving confidence in engineering solutions, providing the transformative engineering processes and designs that will enable tidal energy to make a significant contribution to achieving climate change objectives by 2030-40. CoTide brings together three major university multi-disciplinary teams, each with deep world-leading expertise across the major engineering disciplines essential for the design of tidal stream devices. These include device hydrodynamics, composites and rotor materials, structures and reliability, metocean resource and environmental modelling, system control and optimisation. The constituent engineering design capabilities will be integrated towards addressing the big questions facing tidal stream energy developers through a unified control co-design process. Through this holistic approach, CoTide will not only develop the framework to assess the impact of design drivers and design decisions but will contribute fundamental understanding of unsteady rotor loads and means to control and resist these, how to use contemporary and emerging manufacturing methods to benefit cost and through-life reliability in addition to maximising the potential of digitalisation for optimal performance. With input from its Independent Advisory Board, the Programme resources will be periodically reviewed, adapted and refocused to concentrate on the research challenges that emerge from our research, the tidal energy sector and policy space, and that offer the best opportunities to support industry cost reduction pathways. As CoTide evolves, in addition to its core skills, the partners have a significant breadth of additional expertise to draw upon, with world leading capabilities in complementary areas within offshore renewable energy. CoTide is an ambitious but realistic programme that has the scale, academic gravitas, and resource to achieve innovation through addressing transformative design questions. Through its co-design framework, considering the full scope of interconnected engineering challenges and environmental factors, it will deliver the understanding, tools and data to support the progressive and step change reductions in cost and uncertainty needed to deliver scalable, sustainable and affordable tidal stream energy.

The High End Computing Consortium for Wave Structure Interaction (HEC WSI) is a new and emerging communities consortium that represents the established community of researchers in wave structure interaction that are working together through the support of the CCP-WSI+ (Collaborative Computational Project on Wave Structure Interaction plus). This brings together a community of researchers in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structure mechanics (CSM) who are developing and applying fully coupled wave structure interaction numerical modelling tools suitable for the latest challenges in coastal and ocean engineering, and other wave structure interaction (WSI) free surface flow problems, such as sloshing in containers and liquid fuels, and would benefit from access to significant HPC resource. The consortium addresses underpinning research applicable to Net Zero and Decarbonisation solutions aligned with UK Government strategy and will enable new science and innovation unlocked by access to high-end computing capabilities for solving WSI problems in these areas. The consortium will make significant technical developments of software codes to enhance their suitability for high-end computing. These will include optimising key codes used within the WSI community to achieve better scalability of the multi-phase solvers, developing tools to allow interoperability between the solvers for fluids and solid mechanics, developing coupling strategies between wave, wind, rigid body and hydro elastics models for different applications in costal/ocean engineering and related areas, and also developing AI/ML surrogate modelling tools informed by high fidelity WSI simulations utilising the aforementioned developments. The consortium will maximise the involvement of the whole community working on coastal and ocean engineering and related areas. These will include providing the opportunity for researchers in the community to port and benchmark their own codes and to use the software codes supported by the consortium on the HPC resource. The HEC WSI will also provide opportunities for early career researchers to learn and become proficient in using HPC resources and will serve as a forum to communicate research and share HEC WSI expertise within the WSI community, helping to promote the highest quality engineering research and provide leadership in developing strategic agendas for the WSI community. The success of this consortium will be ensured by supporting the existing wide CCP-WSI+ network of over 200 researchers, spanning academia and industry in 5 continents working on WSI, ORE (offshore renewable energy) and other relevant applications and sectors. The community will be strengthened and consolidated through this project. The HEC WSI will expand the volume of users, provide support for the WSI and wider community and significantly enhance WSI codes for them to be used on HPCs and most advanced high-end computing systems by the end of this project.