Development Strategy |
 
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Development Strategy |
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Based on our existing marine engineering and software development skills, Wood identified an opportunity to develop and deliver a new simulator to help support the floating wind industry. An independent technical advisory group was established in 2016, with a view to garnering real-world feedback from key players in the floating wind industry. Guidance from the steering group has helped to shape a new product offering in this area, known as Flexcom Wind. First launched in June 2017, further versions of the software have been developed over time.
Rather than independently developing a brand new aerodynamic modelling capability, the Flexcom development team decided instead to team up with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the United States Department of Energy. Since about 2000, NREL have been progressively developing a software product called OpenFAST (an acronym for Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence), a tool for simulating the coupled dynamic response of wind turbines. The software is highly regarded from a technical perspective by leading experts in the wind industry, and the research goals of NREL are well reflected by the state-of-the-art analytical solver which they have produced. Given that development efforts have focused exclusively on technical aspects of the solution, OpenFAST does not have any conventional user interface associated with it (all user inputs are defined via a series of plain text input files), so it is not perceived as being overly user-friendly, particularly for first time users. This is not surprising as OpenFAST was not designed to be a commercial software product. Instead NREL have generously made the software freely available as an open-source product, with the aim of aiding and accelerating the global development of the floating wind industry. On a practical level, OpenFAST is effectively a modularised framework of several component software modules (Jonkman, 2013). From a Flexcom perspective, the modules of primary interest are the wind loading processor, InflowWind, its aerodynamic solver, AeroDyn and control module ServoDyn. The coupling with these modules serves as an ideal complement to Flexcom's long established structural and hydrodynamic modelling capabilities.
Flexcom 2025.1.2 (March 2025) is coupled with OpenFAST V3.5.3 (April 2024).