Hardening Advanced Methods for Predicting 3D Unsteady Flows Around Wind Turbines for Industrial Use
Wind power plays an increasingly important role in satisfying the power needs of the U.S., and serves to increase energy security and reduce dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels. With increased penetration, significant maintenance costs and reductions in power generation have underscored the need to predict the unsteady loading related to turbine configuration, layout and off-design conditions. Contemporary design tools fail to account for the unsteady fluid structure interactions that drive costly fatigue, and thus, the research community has started utilizing High Performance Computing solvers to investigate these phenomena. Unfortunately, such tools require dedicated experts to generate reliable predictions and are too complicated and expensive for routine industrial use. This problem is exacerbated for wind turbines given the coupling between blade motion, flexibility, wake aerodynamics, the interaction with other turbines and the turbulent atmosphere. In a prior DOE effort, Continuum Dynamics, Inc. (CDI) and Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) developed an advanced method for predicting wind turbine/farm aeromechanics. While this effort successfully demonstrated improved analysis capabilities, the High Performance Computing software still requires expert users to exploit their capabilities. This STTR effort built upon this prior work and the experience of CDI and GIT in developing numerical methods, along with collaborators in the wind energy industry, to extend, harden and ultimately transition these numerical methods to industry. This effort investigated critical code hardening issues such as automated input generation and checking, and throughput optimization. Reductions in computational cost of 1000x were demonstrated for several applications. One of the most significant barriers to transitioning solvers to industry is that many HPC-level solvers require complete adoption, thereby preventing the reuse of legacy software. Given the significant investment in such software, this barrier is often insurmountable. CDI has adopted a successful modular software strategy to address this barrier, where advanced solver components are packaged as libraries that enable industry to adopt the solvers without the total loss of institutional knowledge. Through standardized interfaces, this facilitates the development of traceable, hierarchical HPC analysis tools that no longer need expert users. In this vein, interfacing between components of the wind turbine aeromechanics methods and the industry standard wind turbine analysis, FAST, was undertaken.
- Research Organization:
- Continuum Dynamics, Inc.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Contributing Organization:
- Continuum Dynamics, Inc.
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0013231
- OSTI ID:
- 1542186
- Type / Phase:
- STTR (Phase II)
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-CDI-13231
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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