Abstract
Recent studies have pointed out the potential of several coastal or river areas to provide significant energy resources in the near future. However, technological processes for extracting energy using Marine Current Energy Converters (MCEC) are not generically "field-ready" and still require significant research to be set up. The present work comes within this framework: we develop the numerical model OceaPoS, useful to carry out a comprehensive description of turbulent flow patterns past MCEC and forward optimize the turbine arrays configurations and evaluate their environmental effects. The OceaPos model consists in describing the fluid as an ensemble of Lagrangian particles ruled by a Stochastic process. OceaPos follows the same methodology than SDM-WindPoS model for wind farm simulations and adapts the Lagrangian stochastic downscaling method (SDM) of Bossy et al. (2016, 2018) to the tidal and oceanic boundary layer. We also introduce a Lagrangian version of actuator discs to take account of one or several MCEC's devices and their effects on the flow dynamics. Several benchmarks are presented, and numerical predictions are compared to experimental results.