Hey all,
I wanted to ask about the release date of the new FAST version that includes BeamDyn module. I hope it is soon.
Dear Khaled,
Our goal is to release FAST v8 coupled to BeamDyn in June, 2015. We may release the standalone BeamDyn module (uncoupled from FAST) sooner so people have a chance to try play with it before it is coupled to FAST.
You can read about the latest BeamDyn developments in our recently published AIAA SciTech 2015 paper: nrel.gov/docs/fy15osti/63165.pdf.
Best regards,
Dear Jason,
It is so bad to hear such news. I thought it is going to be released early 2015. Any way, I am now working on structural response of the blades and I am looking for a software that deals with anisotropic properties of composites, any thoughts??
Dear Khaled,
Until this new release of FAST is available, one option you have if you own MSC.ADAMS, is to use the FAST-to-ADAMS preprocessor to generate the ADAMS model. The FAST-to-ADAMS preprocessor supports blades with anisotropic coupling.
Best regards,
Dear Jason,
Thank you for your response. I read the paper in the link above and it mentioned other preprocessors like PreComp and VABS. Can these softwares do the job? And the more important question is : can FAST handle anisotropic materials’ properties in its calculations? … thank you again for your response.
Dear Khaled,
PreComp and VABS are sectional analysis tools that are used to derive equivalent beam properties of a cross section (6x6 sectional mass and stiffness matrices) based on the shape and composite layup of the cross section. A beam-analysis tool, such as BeamDyn, coupled within an aero-elastic tool is still needed to run load cases and calculate response over a range of conditions.
Regarding FAST, similar questions have been asked on the forum: FAST Blade Structure: Isotropic vs. Anisotropic material. Again, the arrival of BeamDyn will greatly expand the capability of FAST to analyze large flexible composite blades.
Best regards,
Dear all,
I need a beam tool to perform static load analysis of wind turbine blades. Where and how can we get a standalone copy of BeamDyn?
pBEAM and BladeFS are useful but I can’t use them for my project because they have too many software dependencies (Python, C++, Matlab MCR, etc…).
I need a tool written in a single language that can be easily implemented on a cluster. Fortran, Python, or Matlab code is ideal.
Thank you,
Matias
Dear Matias,
I’m not sure what your problem is with pBEAM and BladeFS, but we haven’t yet released the standalone BeamDyn module (uncoupled from FAST). From your post, it sounds like standalone BeamDyn is what you need, but we are still making changes to BeamDyn as we work to couple it to FAST v8.
Best regards,
First of all, I would like to thank everyone over there for releasing v8.12, looks like some great improvements.
I would like to continue working on creating a library from FAST with version 8.12 so that I can use BEAMDyn, however as far as I can tell (from TestCase26), the BeamDyn module is relatively slow to converge. Is there anything I am missing to be able to get the same sort of convergence times as regular ElastoDyn?
Of course I understand that FEA convergence times are much larger than the model of ElastoDyn, however I attempted a number of modifications to TestCase26 and it appears to me that the BeamDyn is very sensitive and the only way can reduce convergence time is by modifying “stop_tol”, which has as default 1E-05.
Dear Joseph,
In the release of FAST v8.12, enabling BeamDyn greatly slows down FAST. The actual time will depend on the time step, quadrature, Newton-Raphson options, element order, etc. Our first priority in development was getting BeamDyn to function and provide accurate results, not computational speed. We hope to address the computational speed in a future release. As with any finite-element model, I suggest that you perform your own convergence study to balance accuracy with speed.
Best regards,