Adapting Baseline IEA 3.4 RWT to a Vestas V100/1800 Wind Turbine

Wind & Water Structural Analysis
1

Hello everyone,

My name is Emilio, and I am currently an undergraduate student. I recently started a research internship which focuses on operational modal analysis of wind turbines, and as part of this effort I am planning to model a wind turbine using OpenFAST. I am interested in modelling an onshore Vestas V100/1800 turbine, unfortunately there is not an existing model online for this turbine, as such, I am trying to follow the open-source model development procedure applied in GitHub - NREL/openfast-turbine-models: A repository of OpenFAST turbine models developed by NREL researchers. .

I previously sent an email to an NREL researcher to ask for a recommended baseline model to adapt using this method and he recommended two things:

They then mentioned the following:

  • I should match the power and thrust curves with WISDEM
  • Generate a wind turbine model with WEIS, do a sanity check of the turbine generated by WEIS on the resulting model dynamics.
  • Finally, tweak the constraints such as frequency or blade shape to modify the structural response to make it more realistic.

Now, I have edited the scripts found in the “combined aerostruct opt2” to adapt the IEA 3.4 RWT wind turbine model. Basically, I only changed the starting file for the IEA turbine to have the same hub height, rotor diameter, and rated power as the Vestas to start with, and I also changed the file “tower_struct_opt.py” such that the scaled tower diameter follows the same measurements as the Vestas V100/1800 I am trying to model. I also went into all the analysis and modelling options and made sure that the file references are correct so that I can run the .py files in order without issues. After doing this I got a lot of questions.

  1. I understand that this is the first step in the process where WISDEM will generate an optimized wind turbine model based on the specs I gave. What I don’t understand is how I can make sure I get the power and thrust curves from the process. Am I supposed to change any of my modelling options files to ensure that this data is output?

  2. I noticed the slurm file “mpi_aerostruct_opt.slurm” asks for 8 hours of time to run the optimization and asks python to run the processes with 94 cores. I have set up a Conda environment with WISDEM, WEIS, and OpenFAST in my university’s HPC to run the batch process but I am worried about the size of this simulation because of the amount of time and cores allocated to the process. Is this approach going to generate a massive amount of data? If so in, what range of gigabytes can I expect? Just wanna make sure WISDEM outputs are small since we have limited scratch space at the moment.

  3. I’d like to know if there are more things that can change in my starting geometry besides basic dimensions to match the real turbine better. Is this something I should do in the WISDEM step of the process, or should I make an initial attempt with basic parameters?

  4. Lastly, I also would like to know if there are things I should consider changing in the modelling and analysis files based on my research focus and recommendations I got.

Looking forward to hearing back from users in this forum. I also understand is this process seems too ambitious; I am new to this software so any tutorials I should go through to reach my end goal would also be nice.

2

Hi Emilio,
welcome to the forum. Your request is not uncommon, and we often find ourselves building OpenFAST models of OEM turbines where we do not have access to the full aero-servo-hydro-elastic model. The activity is however non trivial, and it takes quite a bit of experience to get something together. We do have an internal-only tool that we use, but unfortunately we cannot share it externally. The script that you found can also be useful, but it is not maintained, and I cannot provide specific guidance about it. My recommendation is instead to familiarize yourself with the systems engineering tool WISDEM and its documentation WISDEM ® Documentation — WISDEM 2.0 documentation. The examples provide the fundamental building blocks for a successful redesign. Make sure you take a look at example 16 16. Inverse Design Example — WISDEM 2.0 documentation
Note also that you don’t need large computational resources to get something decent together. A good laptop will be sufficient. No need to spin up 94 cores. The latest WISDEM is more efficient than older versions, and it automatically allocates processes on the available processors. No need to block 94 cores. Also, it’s often a good idea to start from smaller and simpler optimization problems and go up in complexity as you become more familiar with the codes.
I hope this gives you a start.
Best regards

3

Hi Pietro,

I appreciate the response. I will take a look at the documentation and the provided examples. Thanks for pointing out example 16, it is exactly the type of example I was looking for. I will update on my progress in this thread as I go.

All the best,
Emilio.