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High fidelity blade-resolved and actuator line data from a 16 turbine wind farm simulation using ExaWind

  • Cheung, Lawrence | Sandia National Laboratory
  • Henry de Frahan, Marc | National Renewable Energy Laboratory
  • Sprague, Michael | National Renewable Energy Laboratory
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Overview

Description

This data was generated with the ExaWind code suite (https://github.com/Exawind) as a demonstration of a large, 16 turbine wind farm simulation, calculated using two different levels of fidelity. The lower level of fidelity approach uses an actuator line approach to represent the turbines, and was simulated with AMR-Wind (https://github.com/Exawind/amr-wind/) as the background flow solver, coupled to OpenFAST (https://github.com/OpenFAST/openfast). The higher level of fidelity simulation uses a blade-resolved approach, and is done using AMR-Wind, Nalu-Wind (https://github.com/Exawind/nalu-wind), OpenFAST, and TIOGA (https://github.com/Exawind/tioga). In the blade-resolved simulation, ExaWind couples together a background flow solver, AMR-Wind, and a near-body solver, Nalu-Wind, through an overset technique from the TIOGA application. OpenFAST handles the structural dynamics of the turbine blades and towers, which informs the fluid-structure interaction of the wind turbines with the flow solvers. In the actuator line simulation, a mesh of 295M elements was used for a 5km x 5km domain, and it was simulated using 256 nodes (2048 GPU's) on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility Frontier supercomputer. For the blade-resolved simulation, 1.5B element mesh was used in the AMR-Wind background 5km x 5km domain, and 16M elements were used for each turbine in the Nalu-Wind domains, for a total of 1.7B elements. This was simulated using 384 nodes on Frontier, with each node using 56 cores for Nalu-Wind and 8 GPU cores. The data in this archive includes the turbine outputs from OpenFAST, 2D sampling planes from AMR-Wind, and full-field solution files from AMR-Wind and Nalu-Wind.

Funding Resources

DOE Contract Number

DE-NA0003525; DE-AC36-08GO28308

Originating Research Organization

Sandia National Laboratories

Other Contributing Organizations

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

Sponsoring Organization

Office of Science (SC); Wind Energy Technology Office (WETO)

Project Identifier

CFD162

Details

DOI

10.13139/OLCF/3003276

Release Date

December 10, 2025

Dataset

Dataset Type

AS Animations/Simulations

Software

python, VisIt, or Paraview

Acknowledgements

This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

Category

  • 17 WIND ENERGY

Keywords

  • wind energy,
  • amr-wind,
  • openfast,
  • wind farm,
  • wind turbines,
  • computational fluid dynamics,
  • exawind,
  • nalu-wind