FAST real-time run

Wind & Water Computer-Aided Engineering Software Tools
1

Hi,
I did an attempt in the past to obtain the behavior in the subject. I’m not even sure if the theoretical approach was correct.

Basically I would test FAST in a hardware-in-the-loop environment where the external bladed dll should serve as a proxy to the real world sensors. I didn’t had enough time to investigate this deeply, but I remember I was stuck on how to feed aerodyn wind with real wind data.

Anyway, supposing that a FAST run is quicker than real-time and the execution of the external DLL code relatively quicker than the integration step, the simulation should always be ahead of the real clock, then a delay loop in the DLL will slow it and sync to real.

Is this correct?

Thanks,
Stefano

2

Dear Stefano,

You’re suggested way of getting FAST to run real time sounds reasonable, but there are probably several ways you could go about doing this via modifications to FAST. Our controls team at NREL has linked FAST with LabView to achieve this.

The “hub-height” file option is often used to feed measured wind data (from an anemometer) into AeroDyn. But because the hub-height file assumes uniform (or sheared) flow over the rotor disk, this approach may not be adequete for the modeling of large utility-scale wind turbines.

Best regards,