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Wakes Compared (wcomp)

Wakes Compared (wcomp)#

Wind farm flow control presents an opportunity to improve the cost of energy and energy yield of wind farms in specific environments. A class of software tools that model the effects of wake losses and opportunities for wake loss mitigation via wind farm flow control has emerged in the past decade. Many of these tools share key characteristics:

  • Written in the Python programming language

  • Implement multiple steady-state, analytical wake models

  • Target workstation use

  • Integrate with optimization software ecosystems

However, software design decisions and implementation details can lead to discrepancies and errors across tools that reference corresponding models. wcomp is a Python package that provides an interface to data structures and plotting functions that enable the comparison of wake model implementations across different software tools. At its core, wcomp provides a set of data structures to contain the results of a wind farm wake model simulation and a set of plotting functions to inspect these data structures. Any wind farm wake modeling software that implements the wcomp interface can be included in the comparison directly.

Integrated software#

FLORIS

floris

FOXES

foxes

PyWake

pywake

Installation#

Currently, wcomp must be installed manually with pip. The dependencies are:

  • windIO v1.0, can be installed directly from PyPI

  • FLORIS v3.6, can be installed directly from PyPI

  • foxes v0.6.2, can be installed directly from PyPI

  • PyWake v2.5.0 plus three additional commits, must be installed from rafmudaf/PyWake at master branch

Follow these steps to install the dependencies and wcomp:

  1. Create a new Python environment

  2. Install the dependencies:

pip install windIO
pip install foxes==0.6.2
git clone https://github.com/nrel/floris -b develop && pip install -e floris/
git clone https://github.com/rafmudaf/PyWake && pip install -e PyWake/

  1. Install wcomp:

pip install -e wcomp

Getting started#

See WESC 2023 - Simple Demo, Torque 2024 - 1 turbine cases, and Torque 2024 - 4 turbine cases.

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