Incorporating different tidal energy device designs into 4D collision risk simulations allowing increased flexibility for industry

The marine renewable energy industry has created a wide variety of device designs including horizontal and vertical axis tidal turbines. One key issue in consenting the devices is the risk of animal collision withthe infrastructure. Current efforts in addressing collision risk use simplified analytical solutions to calculate probabilities over the swept area of a horizontal axis tidal turbine. However, this method is not appropriate for every device as there are a multiple different tidal energy device designs being tested including tidal kites and cross-flow turbines. The 4D collision risk model is a simulation-based platform which, to date, has investigated a novel tidal energy kite, with a figure-of-eight trajectory, and its collision risk with an object. This earlier work demonstrated the effectiveness of this model to assess differences in collision risk due to variations in the device configuration. In a step change of this work we simulate the collision risk probabilities of three tidal devices: a horizontal axis turbine, a cross-flow turbine and a tidal kite.Here we demonstrate the flexibility and ease in which this 4D model can be adapted to any device type giving the user the ability to quantify a wide range of scenarios which could therefore be of use to developers, consultants and regulators for project design, assessments and licencing.