OpenWARP Architecture

1.0     Project Overview

Recent studies have shown that the maximum technically recoverable energy from U.S. waves and tidal currents in approximately 1,420 terawatt-hours per year (TWh/yr).  From this total, Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) devices could extract an estimated 1,170 TWh/yr along the coast of the United States.  Because 1 TwH is equivalent to the energy consumed by 100,000 American homes in one year (source), this means that WEC devices could technically power 100 million American homes each year. 

With nearly 40% of the nation's population (about 125 million Americans) living in counties directly on the United States' shoreline (source), this renewable energy source is worth the investment.  And because an increasing portion of Americans are moving to the coast each year, accelerating the development of WEC devices could lead to a huge return on investment by providing clean, renewable power to significant portion of the U.S. population. 

But there's one big problem - testing new WEC devices is currently prohibitively expensive.  Developers of these devices require a software model that can simulate the movement of waves and determine the amount of power that their WEC device would output in a wave environment.  This type of modeling software currently costs about $40,000 a year to use.  While large corporations may be able to afford this high price tag, start-ups hoping to enter the wave energy industry cannot.

The goal of this project is to produce a customizable open-source modeling software that can be used by anyone developing WEC devices in the United States.  This will lead to faster innovation so that wave energy start-ups all over the country can develop, analyze, and optimize their devices more quickly than ever before.

1.1     Competition Task Overview

1.1.1 Contest Scope

In the previous contests, our competitors built a tool to generate the mesh based on given testing 3D models. The input 3D model formats are *.stl, *.igs and *.step. The output format is VTK PolyData format (http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkPolyData.html) and *.gdf. See the past POC assembly contest:http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=ProjectDetail&pj=30036440

We also improved the algorithms and rewrote the Nemoh code which was used to run the simulation of the mesh. See http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=ProjectDetail&pj=30041046

In this architecture challenge, we need to integrate the mesh generator and the Nemoh code into one web-based application.

1.1.2 Requirements

The high level requirements are: 

1. Software Type

We're building software than can be compiled locally on a users computer.

2. OS

It must work in both the latest version of Windows and Mac.

3. GUI

We will utilize a browser window to display a GUI. It must work in the latest version of IE, FF and Chrome.

4. Visualization & Post-processing

Within the web-based GUI, a user can make a request to launch ParaView. We will pass data to the native version of ParaView to display the visualization and for any post-processing needs. 

We’ll bundle the open source native version of ParaView with the app we’re building.

5. User Flow

1. User launches app
2. Web browser loads and displays the GUI
3. User can specify settings.
4. User will have to execute the mesher and solver from within the GUI.
5. User can launch ParaView from within the app by clicking a button  and view both the visualization and perform post-processing in the native version of ParaView. The approach can be done by this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22807000/how-to-launch-a-program-application-from-javascript-just-like-some-sites-open-to, We also accept architects to suggest other approaches.

6. The “Coding Websites & Applications” guidelines http://www1.eere.energy.gov/communicationstandards/coding.html should be followed in the next assembly challenge.

1.1.3 Documentation Provided

• Mesh Generator source code - Provided in the forum
• Improved Nemoh code
• The GUI finalized storyboards

Final Submission Guidelines

Submission Deliverables

• Application Design Specification
• Entity Relationship Diagram(s)
• Sequence Diagrams
• Interface Diagrams
• Assembly Specifications

Submission Guidelines

For each member, the final submission should be uploaded to the Online Review Tool.