IEA 15MW and “simple” ccblade

Wind & Water Computer-Aided Engineering Software Tools
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Dear NREL Forum Members,

I’m an amateur in wind power modelling, but I’m very interested to learn. I’m currently studying ccblade and I was able to go though the code, get the gist of it and, of course, run the NREL 5MW example here:

http://wisdem.github.io/CCBlade/tutorial.html#nrel-5-mw

Then I thought I would take a shot in trying a simple modelling of the IEA 15MW turbine from here:

The GitHub repository for the IEA 15MW turbine contains a lot of data, and I’m getting confused at how I could model it in a similar way as the NREL 5MW.

In the ccblade example for the NREL 5MW, all the arrays (r, chord, theta) have the same length (17 elements if I’m not mistaken), together with 17 airfoils placed at their proper radial positions, while this specific file for the IEA 15MW:

Has an array for the airfoil positions made of 10 elements, the chord with 53 elements and the twist with 50. I also found 50 polars in kind-of-Aerodyn-format (IEA-15-240-RWT/OpenFAST/IEA-15-240-RWT/Airfoils at master · IEAWindTask37/IEA-15-240-RWT · GitHub).

I know I could model the IEA 15MW turbine with WISDEM, for example, but I’d like to keep things simple to understand.

Can anyone share some suggestions on how I could reformat/preprocess the IEA 15MW turbine data in order to have same-size arrays and airfoils to pass to ccblade?

My apologies for the dumb question. I’m of course open to be indoctrinated if I’m making some terrible basic mistakes in my misunderstandings.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

Andrea.

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Hello Andrea,
you’re very right, my first suggestion would be to run WISDEM, which will compile CCBlade, interpolate the airfoil polars using a PCHIP, and then call CCBlade for a realistic regulation trajectory (among many other things). This said, I do have a simple script that goes from yaml to CCBlade, and I’ve just uploaded it here run_ccblade/run_ccblade.py at main · ptrbortolotti/run_ccblade · GitHub
You might need to manipulate the dependencies, but hopefully this will help.
Best regards,
Pietro Bortolotti

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If it helps, here is the link to get started with WISDEM.

One of the example directories contains multiple reference turbines, including the NREL 5-MW and IEA Wind 15-MW:

Running these in WISDEM will use the yaml-inputs and run CCBlade, along with many other modules, in the background.

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Thank you Pietro for your super fast response.

This is exactly what I needed, I used your script as is to generate reasonable airfoils data (before calling ccblade), so I can store them separately for further analysis.

Thank you again.

Andrea.