This document constitutes Deliverable D2.4 ‘Specification of Design and Evaluation Support Software Tools’ of the LiftWEC project. LiftWEC is a collaborative research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 851885. It is the intention of the project consortium that the LiftWEC project culminates in the development of one or more promising configurations of a Wave Energy Converter operating through the use of one or more rotating hydrofoils that generate lift as the primary interaction with the incident waves. This report details a suite of Concept Design and Concept Evaluation support tools that will be developed to support the project in this goal.

Concept Design support tools are tools that will be used to provide a rapid, approximate, yet representative indication of system characteristics for one or more particular characteristics of a wave-driven rotating hydrofoil system. The Concept Design support tools will enable users to gain familiarity with the fundamental system physics and develop an initial understanding of the potential influence of key design decisions on system performance without the need to resort to complex, high fidelity, computationally expensive numerical methods. Thus, Concept Design support tools will not exhaustively model all relevant physical processes influencing the given system performance characteristic, but rather will allow rapid, iterative investigation of the design space to identify key variable interdependencies. It is intended that Concept Design support tools will be developed which can; (1) identify the Optimum Hydrofoil Path, (2) estimate the system Power Capture, (3) identify the magnitude and nature of Cyclic/Reactive Energy cycled within the system, (4) estimate the Fundamental Reaction Forces, (5) estimate the Hydrofoil Reaction Torque, and (6) estimate the Annual Energy Production and Annual Structural Loading. The specifications of these Concept Design support tools are presented in this document.

Noting that the LiftWEC project is characterised by the application of a three-phase iterative design and development exercise seeking to identify the most promising configuration(s) of a lift-based Wave Energy Converter, the Concept Evaluation support toolset will be used at the project Stage-Gates to assess the various LiftWEC concepts using a whole-systems approach. These evaluation exercises will be used to select those LiftWEC system configurations and sub-systems which are deemed to hold the greatest potential at each project Stage-Gate and forward them for further investigation. At each Stage-Gate, the evaluation exercise will be repeated incorporating the new design knowledge generated during the previous project phase, thus continually narrowing the work to focus on those systems which are thought to represent those with the greatest potential for successful development as a commercial entity. The specification of the Concept Evaluation toolset which will be used to conduct these assessments is also presented in this document.