Turbine Design
Software helps design wind turbines. There are several aero-elastic packages that are used in this design process.
FOCUS aids in the design of wind turbines and turbine components such as rotor blades. FOCUS has been used for over a decade and is developed by Knowledge Centre Wind turbine Materials and Constructions (WMC) and Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN).
GH Bladed is a de facto industry standard, developed by independent consultant Garrad Hassan and validated by Germanischer Lloyd for calculating turbine loads for design and certification.
FLEX is mainly used in the Danish industry. Lloyd also validated FLEX for the calculation of wind turbine loads for design and certification.
The MLS Control Design Toolbox is a Matlab post-processing tool to handle the results of FLEX and Bladed simulations that also contains controller design capabilities. It was developed by independent consultants MLS.
The National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), a division of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has developed many packages which are used by turbine manufacturers and researchers. NWTC has developed a suite of turbine design and performance prediction codes which rely on Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory. WT_Perf uses steady BEM theory to model turbine performance. FAST is a comprehensive aero-elastic simulator which uses unsteady BEM theory to model a turbine as a collection of rigid and flexible bodies in a spatiotemporal field of turbulent flow. Germanischer Lloyd found FAST suitable for "the calculation of onshore wind turbine loads for design and certification."
The open source software QBlade developed by the wind energy research group of Hermann Föttinger Institute of TU Berlin (Chair of Fluid Dynamics) is a BEM code coupled with the airfoil simulation code XFOIL. It allows the user to develop/import airfoil shapes, simulate them and use them for the design and simulation of wind turbine blades/rotors with the use of steady state BEM theory. The software is built with the Qt framework thus it includes a very user friendly GUI.
Read more about this topic: Wind Energy Software
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