CL-Windcon project team visited NREL in USA to meet their SOWFA specialists

Thanks to these synergies, the project advances in the management of the superController which allows the control of the wind farm as a hole

CL-Windcon partners: CENER (National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain), Polimi (Politecnico di Milano) and TU-Delft (Delft University of Technology) have attained the use of 30 million CPU hours at CINECA (Italy) through an awarded PRACE call. The computation period began April 2018 and will last during one year.

In order to get as much from the computation time at CINECA, Sugoi Gomez-Iradi (CENER), Paolo Schiotto (POLIMI) and Bart Doekemeijer (TU-Delft) traveled at the end of April to NREL facilities at Boulder, Colorado (USA) to meet with NREL SOWFA specialists (Matt Churchfield, Ganesh Vijayakumar and Paula Doubrawa). Four working days were dedicated to analyze the last pre-release version of SOWFA integrated with OpenFAST and the superController. Thanks to the interactions with NREL specialists, CL-Windcon SOWFA team is now able to generate the precursors (initial wind field conditions) and to run SOWFA using the precursors, as well as run the superController on OpenFAST. (The superController is the tool that allows the control of the wind farm as a hole).

The computation time achieved at PRACE is equivalent to 3,450 cores used 24 hours/365 days and will be dedicated to CL-Windcon computational activities devoted to SOWFA software (work packages WP1 and WP3). The SOWFA software has been developed by NREL and is a high-fidelity simulator for the interaction between the wind turbine dynamics and the fluid flow in a wind farm. The SOWFA software is computationally very demanding so it will be used as input to validate the medium fidelity, control-oriented models developed during the CL-Windcon, as well as for the analysis of specific features of the developed farm control algorithms.

It was a very fruitful collaboration with NREL and an opportunity to develop synergies between CL-Windcon project partners. NREL participates in the CL-Windcon project as external advisor and its role is being key to perform some of the software developments.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 727477