Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National

Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000..

Simulating the Entire Life of an Offshore Wind Turbine

Matthew Barone, Josh Paquette, and Brian Resor

Wind Energy Technologies Department

Sandia National Laboratories

Lance Manuel and Hieu Nguyen

Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering

University of Texas at Austin

High Performance Computing and Wind Energy

Vestas “Firestorm” Computer180 Tflop peak performance

#3 ‘fastest’ industry supercomputer in the world

From: Calaf, Parlange, & Meneveau, Phys. Fluids 23, 2011.

From: Larsen et al, European TOPFARM project final report.

Wind farm optimization LES of wind turbine arrays

Example Applications of HPC to Wind Energy

Growing Industry Resources

50-year recurrence ??

50-year recurrence? ?

Uncertainty in Wind Turbine Extreme Load Extrapolation

For DLC 1.1 the characteristic value of load shall be determined by a statistical load extrapolation and correspond to an exceedance probability, for the largest value in any 10-min period, of less than or equal to 3.8 x 10–7, (i.e. a 50-year recurrence period) for normal design situations.

From: IEC 61400-1 Ed. 3 – Wind Turbine Design Standards

6 weeks of simulation

2 different fits

128 hours of simulation (many different realizations)

Fits to 2 different realizations

Research Questions for the Computer

What are the probability distributions for various one-hour extreme turbine loads for an offshore wind turbine in shallow water?•Compute these down to fifty-year recurrence

probabilities. What turbulent wind inflow and wave conditions

lead to the largest turbine loads?•Save the input parameters for each simulation so

that select simulations can be reproduced later. What are the uncertainties for a given load

extrapolation procedure?

Sandia High-Performance Computing Resources Sandia continues to extend a distinguished record in high

performance computing. These resources are available for solving problems in

wind power.

ASCI RedWorld’s First Teraflop Computer

1.3 Teraflops*World Rank (1997): #1

Thunderbird Cluster

53 TeraflopsWorld Rank (2006): #6

450 TeraflopsWorld Rank (2010): #10

Red Mesa Partition:• Dedicated to energy-related work• NREL & Sandia users• 180 Teraflops

*1 Teraflop = 1 Trillion floating point operations per second

Turbine Aero-hydro-elastic Model NREL 5 MW offshore reference turbine

• 3-bladed HAWT with upwind rotor• Monopile foundation, water depth of 20 m• Rotor Diameter = 126 meters• Hub Height = 90 meters• Variable speed, collective variable pitch controller, no active yaw control• Cut-in, Cut-out, and Rated Wind Speed = 3 m/s, 25 m/s, 11.4 m/s

Aero-hydro-elastic Simulation Code• NREL FAST code• Equilibrium BEM ‘inflow’, or ‘wake’, model

Chosen to avoid instabilities associated with dynamic wake models• NREL Turbsim code used to generate inflow turbulence (Kaimal spectrum)• Incident wave field computed using JONSWAP spectrum in FAST

Site Definition Forschung in Nord-Ostsee (FINO) research

platform 45 km north of the Island of Borkum in the

North Sea Measurement Period: November 2003 –

May 2005 Wind: 10-minute mean values of the wind

speed at 100-m height Waves: 1-hour significant wave height from

wave buoy No data for turbulence intensity: we

assumed uniform 10% value for all wind speeds

http://www.dewi.de/dewi/index.php?id=152

Aero-hydro-elastic Load Simulations DAKOTA

• Simulation framework developed at Sandia National Laboratories• Enables large-scale parameter studies, sensitivity analysis, optimization, and UQ• dakota.sandia.gov

Simulation Procedure• DAKOTA samples two random wind seeds, two random wave seeds, and mean wind

speed for each sim using a Latin Hypercube sampling method• Significant wave height and period are taken as expected values conditional on mean

wind speed• DAKOTA asynchronously schedules a simulation on each available core• TurbSim and FAST are run in sequence for each simulation• Random seeds, mean wind speed, and 1-hour extreme values are saved by DAKOTA

Stats• 552,809 simulations performed (~63 years) in four separate batches• 1028 cores used on Red Sky• 5 days of total wall-clock time

Extreme Blade Tip Deflections

Extreme Blade Root Bending Moments

Extreme Tower Base Moments

Extreme Tower Torsional Moment

Extreme Tower Base Fore-Aft Moment vs. Mean Wind Speed

Max. load at U = 15.856 m/s

Extreme Tower Torsional Moment vs. Mean Wind Speed

Max. load at U = 22.915 m/s

Maximum Tower Base Fore-Aft Moment Case

Simulation No. 524,988

Hub Height Wind Speed (m/s)

Blade Pitch (deg)

Sea Surface Level (m)

Tower Fore-Aft Moment (kN-m)

Evaluation of Uncertainty in Load Extrapolation: How much simulation is needed?

128 Simulations 512 Simulations 2048 Simulations

1. The 63 years’ of simulation was used to generate subsets of N simulations

2. Each subset was used to estimate the 1- and 50 year loads using linear least-squares regression below a probability level of 0.1

3. Mean estimates and confidence intervals were generated for the 1- and 50-year load

Evaluating Load Extrapolation Uncertainty – Blade Root Flapwise Moment

Fifty-year Return Load

Evaluating Load Extrapolation Uncertainty – Tower Base Torsional Moment

Fifty-year Return Load

Simulation Challenges Large-scale loads simulations can be an “I/O bound”

supercomputing application rather than “CPU bound”•Many small files are written simultaneously to disk•Caused a problem on Red Sky’s parallel file system

Memory efficiency of sampling algorithm important for large numbers of simulations•Dakota’s Latin hypercube sampling algorithm limited the

number of samples in a single simulation batch

Future Directions Address dynamic wake robustness issue Treat turbulence intensity, significant wave height, wave

spectral peak period, wind shear probabilistically Examine fatigue load spectra Investigate concurrent extreme loads

•Example: what is the probability distribution of edge-wise blade root moment when flap-wise moment exceeds a given value?

Explore potential impact on wind turbine design standards

Acknowledgements Thanks to the Sandia Red Sky team: Steve Monk, Sophia

Corwell, Karen Haskell, Anthony Agelastos, Jeffrey Ogden, Joel Stevenson

Thanks to the DAKOTA team, Brian Adams and Mike Eldred Thanks to Jason Jonkman for assistance in modifying the FAST

code

Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National

Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000..

Thank You