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WISDEM® v3.4.1(Wind Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model) [SWR-14-05]

The Wind Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM®) is a set of models for assessing overall wind plant cost of energy (COE). The models use wind turbine and plant cost and energy production as well as financial models to estimate COE and other wind plant system attributes. WISDEM® is accessed through Python, is built using OpenMDAO, and uses several sub-models that are also implemented within OpenMDAO. These sub-models can be used independently but they are required to use the overall WISDEM® turbine design capability. Please install all of the pre-requisites prior to installing WISDEM® by following the directions below. For additional information about the NWTC effort in systems engineering that supports WISDEM® development, please visit the official NREL systems engineering for wind energy website. https://www.nlr.gov/wind/systems-engineering

Dykes, Katherine↗

WISDEM® v3.15.2 2024 (Wind-Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model) [SWR-14-05]

The Wind-Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM®) is a set of models for assessing overall wind plant cost of energy (COE). The models use wind turbine and plant cost and energy production as well as financial models to estimate COE and other wind plant system attributes. WISDEM® is accessed through Python, is built using OpenMDAO, and uses several sub-models that are also implemented within OpenMDAO. These sub-models can be used independently but they are required to use the overall WISDEM® turbine design capability. Please install all of the pre-requisites prior to installing WISDEM® by following the directions below. For additional information about the NWTC effort in systems engineering that supports WISDEM® development, please visit the official NREL systems engineering for wind energy website. https://www.nrel.gov/wind/systems-engineering.html

Dykes, Katherine↗

WOMBAT (Windfarm Operations and Maintenance cost-Benefit Analysis Tool) WISDEM® [SWR-21-68]

The windfarm operations and maintenance cost-benefit analysis tool (WOMBAT) is software to simulate the operations and maintenance phase of either onshore or offshore windfarms. WOMBAT is a medium-fidelity tool that is designed to model turbine, cable, and substation failures at the subassembly level, but is flexible enough that individual component or asset-level modeling can also be performed. WOMBAT enables users to model technological improvements, the use of a wide range of service equipment from drone repairs and remote resets to heavy lift vessels and crawler cranes, to analyze cost trends with varying trade-offs in conjunction with energy production, availability and a growing range of metrics. This library provides a tool to simulate the operation and maintenance phase (O&M) of distributed, land-based, and offshore windfarms using a discrete event simulation framework. WOMBAT is written around the SimPy discrete event simulation framework. Additionally, this is supported using a flexible and modular object-oriented code base, which enables the modeling of arbitrarily large (or small) windfarms with as many or as few failure and maintenance tasks that can be encoded. Please note that this is still heavily under development, so you may find some functionality to be incomplete at the current moment, but rest assured the functionality is expanding. With that said, it would be greatly appreciated for issues or PRs to be submitted for any improvements at all, from fixing typos (guaranteed to be a few) to features to testing. Also available at: https://pypi.org/project/wombat/

Cooperman, Aubryn↗

INTEGRATE - Inverse Network Transformations for Efficient Generation of Robust Airfoil and Turbine Enhancements

The INTEGRATE (Inverse Network Transformations for Efficient Generation of Robust Airfoil and Turbine Enhancements) project is developing a new inverse-design capability for the aerodynamic design of wind turbine rotors using invertible neural networks. This AI-based design technology can capture complex non-linear aerodynamic effects while being 100 times faster than design approaches based on computational fluid dynamics. This project enables innovation in wind turbine design by accelerating time to market through higher-accuracy early design iterations to reduce the levelized cost of energy. INVERTIBLE NEURAL NETWORKS Researchers are leveraging a specialized invertible neural network (INN) architecture along with the novel dimension-reduction methods and airfoil/blade shape representations developed by collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) learns complex relationships between airfoil or blade shapes and their associated aerodynamic and structural properties. This INN architecture will accelerate designs by providing a cost-effective alternative to current industrial aerodynamic design processes, including: - Blade element momentum (BEM) theory models: limited effectiveness for design of offshore rotors with large, flexible blades where nonlinear aerodynamic effects dominate - Direct design using computational fluid dynamics (CFD): cost-prohibitive - Inverse-design models based on deep neural networks (DNNs): attractive alternative to CFD for 2D design problems, but quickly overwhelmed by the increased number of design variables in 3D problems AUTOMATED COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS FOR TRAINING DATA GENERATION - MERCURY FRAMEWORK The INN is trained on data obtained using the University of Marylands (UMD) Mercury Framework, which has with robust automated mesh generation capabilities and advanced turbulence and transition models validated for wind energy applications. Mercury is a multi-mesh paradigm, heterogeneous CPU-GPU framework. The framework incorporates three flow solvers at UMD, 1) OverTURNS, a structured solver on CPUs, 2) HAMSTR, a line based unstructured solver on CPUs, and 3) GARFIELD, a structured solver on GPUs. The framework is based on Python, that is often used to wrap C or Fortran codes for interoperability with other solvers. Communication between multiple solvers is accomplished with a Topology Independent Overset Grid Assembler (TIOGA). NOVEL AIRFOIL SHAPE REPRESENTATIONS USING GRASSMAN SPACES We developed a novel representation of shapes which decouples affine-style deformations from a rich set of data-driven deformations over a submanifold of the Grassmannian. The Grassmannian representation as an analytic generative model, informed by a database of physically relevant airfoils, offers (i) a rich set of novel 2D airfoil deformations not previously captured in the data , (ii) improved low-dimensional parameter domain for inferential statistics informing design/manufacturing, and (iii) consistent 3D blade representation and perturbation over a sequence of nominal shapes. TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER DEMONSTRATION - COUPLING WITH NREL WISDEM Researchers have integrated the inverse-design tool for 2D airfoils (INN-Airfoil) into WISDEM (Wind Plant Integrated Systems Design and Engineering Model), a multidisciplinary design and optimization framework for assessing the cost of energy, as part of tech-transfer demonstration. The integration of INN-Airfoil into WISDEM allows for the design of airfoils along with the blades that meet the dynamic design constraints on cost of energy, annual energy production, and the capital costs. Through preliminary studies, researchers have shown that the coupled INN-Airfoil + WISDEM approach reduces the cost of energy by around 1% compared to the conventional design approach. This page will serve as a place to easily access all the publications from this work and the repositories for the software developed and released through this pr...

aerodynamics↗

Development of an open-source segmented blade design tool

As wind turbines continue to grow ever larger to reduce the cost of energy, their blades follow suit, with the largest commercial offshore blades extending past 100 m. Massive blades such as these raise key transportation and manufacturing challenges, especially for land-based turbines. Segmented blades are one solution and are garnering increased industry and research interest. In this work, a detailed mechanical joint model is integrated into the Wind-Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM ® ), which will facilitate future segmented blade research and optimization. WISDEM is used to design a wind turbine with 100-m segmented blades. This wind turbine design is compared to other machines with 100-m monolithic blades designed for rail-transportability. The designs are compared in terms of blade mass and cost, turbine capital cost, annual energy production, and levelized cost of energy, with monolithic designs being the lightest and most economical. However, this result may vary by wind plant location. A variety of segmentation joint types exist, and they will inevitably vary in parameters such as cost, spanwise location, and physical characteristics. This work examines the sensitivity of wind turbine design drivers and annual energy production to a variety of the aforementioned parameters, using the open-source wind turbine design codes OpenFAST and WISDEM, finding that joint mass, stiffness, and location can have significant effects on design drivers.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Conceptual monopile and tower sizing for the IEA Wind Task 37 Borssele reference wind farm

This paper explores the preliminary design of the support structures for the IEA Wind Task 37 reference wind farm at the Borssele site III and IV. The study looks at two different design methods that might be used within larger wind farm system design optimization (i.e. lay-out, electrical systems, etc.). The first consists of a scaling tool that scales a detailed design according to the rated power, water depth, hub height and rotor diameter. The second is a physics-based optimization approach that relies on the WISDEM® design tool. This research compares the results of these two methods for the design of both the tower and monopile of the IEA 10-MW and 15-MW reference wind turbines at a range of sea depths (25 m, 30 m, 35 m, 40 m). The two tools yield very similar results in terms of monopile base diameter, support structure natural frequency and mass. WISDEM is then used to also investigate the sensitivity of the design to the tower top forces, wave conditions and the soil conditions. It is shown that tower top forces dominate the design. In general, large diameter structures can carry additional costs associated with manufacturing and transportation requirements. Thus, the paper is concluded with a trade-off study between mass and diameter that quantifies the effect of the reduction in monopile diameter with the increase in structural mass.

WIND ENERGY↗

Functional Requirements for the WEIS Toolset to Enable Controls Co-Design of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

The goal of the new Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS) toolset under development is to provide the offshore wind industry and research communities with an open-source, user-friendly, flexible tool to enable true controls co-design (CCD) of the physical design of a floating offshore wind turbine together with the controller. WEIS will use a multifidelity library of models built on the foundations of WISDEM® and OpenFAST formerly known as FAST). This paper presents the WEIS development plan, including the functional requirements of WEIS (including improvements to WISDEM and OpenFAST) together with associated rationale for their establishment and a qualitative description of the modeling approaches that will be implemented to address these functional requirements. The development of WEIS is a project under the Aerodynamic Turbines Lighter and Afloat with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy.

27 ARPA - Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy↗

GeneratorSE.jl

SAND2026-22941O GeneratorSE.jl is a Julia software package for analytical sizing of variable-speed wind turbine generators. It translates and maintains generator sizing methods from the NREL WISDEM GeneratorSE framework in a Julia package form. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Michelen Strofer, Carlos [Sandia National Lab. (SN↗

Accomplishments and Year-End Performance Report; Wind Energy Program: Fiscal Year 2021

The National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Flatirons Campus, has been a driving force in advancing wind energy technology research worldwide since its designation as a DOE national research center in 1992. Enabled by the Flatirons Campus's world-class facilities, scientists, engineers, analysts, and researchers are pushing the frontiers of science to pursue wind energy innovation. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2021, NREL continued to provide the technical expertise, research capabilities, and industry understanding to support DOE's ambitious climate action and research goals by advancing technology, addressing market and deployment barriers, and driving down costs with more efficient, reliable, and predictable wind energy systems. One of several highlights, NREL received an R&D 100 Special Recognition Award for its Thermoplastic Resin System for Wind Turbine Blades. This breakthrough in the wind turbine manufacturing process will enable the production of recyclable blades that are stronger, longer, and less expensive, while increasing energy capture, decreasing energy and transportation costs, and increasing blade reliability. In a year when the entire U.S. economy struggled to address workforce gaps, an NREL study compared wind industry needs, training programs, and hiring practices with perspectives from students and recent college graduates. Researchers hope that, by pinpointing areas of disconnect, the expectations of employers who have difficulty filling entry-level jobs can better align with the preparation of the potential applicants who find it hard to break into the field. The lab also made numerous new data and modeling resources available in FY 2021. Recent NREL releases include a modeling tool for predicting the power performance and structural loads of wind turbines within a wind farm (FAST.Farm), a computational framework for modeling golden eagle behavior near wind farms, and 20 years of offshore wind data. Updates were also made to the widely used Wind Plant Integrated Systems Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM), which couples engineering and cost models to examine system-level trade-offs. Now, bolstered by a renewed national commitment to tackle climate change and revitalize the U.S. economy through increased investment in clean energy - particularly in offshore wind energy - NREL stands poised to lead the way to a sustainable future that powers the United States with significant levels of reliable, low-cost, accessible wind energy. This report provides an overview of the achievements NREL made on behalf of DOE's Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) and other partners during FY 2021 (between Oct. 1, 2020, and Sept. 30, 2021).

Flatirons Campus↗

Land-based wind turbines with flexible rail-transportable blades – Part 1: Conceptual design and aeroservoelastic performance

This work investigates the conceptual design and the aeroservoelastic performance of land-based wind turbines whose blades can be transported on rail via controlled bending. The turbines have a nameplate power of 5 MW and a rotor diameter of 206 m, and they aim to represent the next generation of land-based machines. Three upwind designs and two downwind designs are presented, combining different design goals together with conventional glass and pultruded carbon fiber laminates in the spar caps. One of the five blade designs is segmented and serves as a benchmark to the state of the art in industry. The results show that controlled flexing requires a reduction in the flapwise stiffness of the blades, but it represents a promising pathway for increasing the size of land-based wind turbine rotors. Given the required stiffness, the rotor can be designed either downwind with standard rotor preconing and nacelle uptilt angles or upwind with higher-than-usual angles. A downwind-specific controller is also presented, featuring a cut-out wind speed reduced to 19 m s –1 and a pitch-to-stall shutdown strategy to minimize blade tip deflections toward the tower. The flexible upwind and downwind rotor designs equipped with pultruded carbon fiber spar caps are found to generate the lowest levelized cost of energy, 2.9 % and 1.3 %, respectively, less than the segmented design. The paper concludes with several recommendations for future work in the area of large flexible wind turbine rotors.

17 WIND ENERGY↗