MHKiT

Project Purpose

The ability to collect, ingest, condition, reduce, quality control, process, visualize, and store data is critical at all stages of marine energy research and technology/project development. MHKiT empowers the marine energy industry by providing a toolbox of marine energy specific functionality that enables rapid data processing using opensource, verified, and industry standard data handling, allowing for the community to collaboratively develop and expand MHKiT based on industry needs.

Project Description 

MHKiT is an open-source marine energy software, developed in Python and MATLAB, that includes modules for ingesting, quality controlling, processing, visualizing, and managing data. MHKiT-Python and MHKiT-MATLAB provide robust and verified functions in both Python and MATLAB that are needed by the marine energy community to standardize data processing. Calculations and visualizations adhere to International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) technical specifications and other guidelines.

MHKiT is developed as a collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Development of MHKiT is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office.

Project Methods

The MHKiT team leverages previous efforts by the National Labs and guidance from the IEC standards to develop robust and standardized software for the marine energy community. By being an open source project, hosted on GitHub, the marine energy community can take an active role in defining future development in MHKiT but submitting ideas for functionality and code for review to be included in MHKiT. New functionality is continuously added to MHKiT as the industry evolves, and new standardized software needs emerge. Marine energy researchers are strongly encouraged to add or request new data processing functionality.

Key Findings/Applications

MHKiT provides the following benefits to the marine energy community:

  • Eliminates the redundant data processing software across the marine energy field
  • Offers a standardized, referenceable, and readable data processing suite
  • Enables rapid data processing
  • Creates a data flow of quality control (QC), analysis, and visualization
  • Offers a common development platform across the marine energy community where issues are discussed, and features are expanded
  • Assists developers in device certification for insurance, regulator bodies, and investors
This table lists documents associated with the MHKiT project, including reports written by the project team, links to relevant data or modeling codes, and papers that have used the project outputs or are closely associated with them. To find additional datasets and documents that look at the environmental perspective of this work, explore the MHKiT page on PRIMRE.