Capytaine: a Python-based linear potential flow BEM solver

Capytaine is a Python package for the simulation of the interaction between water waves and floating bodies in frequency domain.

It is built around a full rewrite of the open source Boundary Element Method (BEM) solver Nemoh for the linear potential flow wave theory.

This documentation is for version 2.2.1 (released Nov 18, 2024).

The documentations of older versions are available there: v1.5, v2.0, v2.1, v2.2.

• Features

Private support, custom developments and training can be provided by Eurobios Mews Labs (contact@mews-labs.com).

For free support, you can ask questions on the public Github discussion page or as Github issues. Please do not contact the developers directly by email, unless you are looking for private paid support.

Contributions are welcome! Please report bugs and suggest improvements as Github issues.

Documentation

• User manual
  • Installation for users
  • Quickstart
  • Tutorial
  • Meshes
  • Floating body
  • Hydrostatics
  • Setting up a problem
  • Resolution
  • Outputs
  • Post-processing
  • Conventions and differences to other codes
  • Cookbook

• Developer manual
  • Installation for developers
  • Overview of the modules
  • API documentation

• Theory manual
  • Theory manual
  • Bibliography

• Citing
• Changelog

Source code

Available on Github

License

Capytaine is developed by Matthieu Ancellin with the welcome help of several contributors.

Since April 2022, the development of Capytaine is funded by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, Managing and Operating Contractor for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) for the U.S. Department of Energy.

From April 2017 to March 2019, the development of Capytaine at University College Dublin (UCD) was funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Marine Renewable Energy Ireland (MaREI), the SFI Centre for Marine Renewable Energy Research.

Capytaine is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3.0. See the LICENSE file in the code repository. This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

The Fortran core routines of Capytaine are also available under the Apache License 2.0 and can be found in the capytaine/green_functions/libDelhommeau directory of Capytaine’s repository.

Capytaine is a fork of the version 2 of Nemoh, which has been developed by Gérard Delhommeau, Aurélien Babarit et al., (École Centrale de Nantes) and was distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

Capytaine includes code from meshmagick by François Rongère (École Centrale de Nantes), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The boat mesh in the animation above is in the public domain.