<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  Flexcom > Examples > L - Wind Energy >
L06 - IEA 22MW RWT

Introduction

This example considers the IEA 22 MW reference wind turbine and recreates the model in Flexcom. Full details of the turbine are provided in the official definition document (Zahle et al., 2024) while some of the main aspects are briefly summarised here.

The results section presents a brief summary of a code-to-code comparison of simulation models built using OpenFAST, OrcaFlex and Flexcom. As the study is focused on the aeroelastic response, the turbine is fixed at its base, and no hydrodynamic effects are considered. Full details of the numerical models and the benchmarking exercise may be found in the technical paper (Britton et. al., 2025). Consistent with the copyright agreement, the authors hereby acknowledge ASME as the original publisher and copyright holder.

Three separate loading scenarios are considered namely, steady wind (time invariant), stepped wind (wind speed increasing incrementally in steps over time), and turbulent wind (full field wind turbulence).

Turbine

The turbine was jointly developed by DTU and NREL. The main components of the turbine were designed sequentially with multidisciplinary design tools. The rotor was designed using DTU’s in-house Aero-Structural Optimization Framework for Wind Turbines (AESOpt) and aeroelastic code HAWC2. NREL’s Wind-Plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM) and Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS) toolchains were used to design the drivetrain, tower, monopile, and semisubmersible floater. The turbine was designed primarily with medium-fidelity aeroelastic modeling (such as in Flexcom).

The IEA 22 MW RWT data is open source and is available on the IEA Wind Systems GitHub site IEA Wind Systems GitHub. The primary file format used to define dimensions and properties of the turbine is the WindIO format. Aero-servo-hydro-elastic input files to model the turbine in various modelling tools (including Flexcom) are also available in the repository.

The main properties of the IEA 22 MW reference wind turbine are as follows:

Results

Results may be examined the following sections.

•Steady Wind

•Stepped Wind

•Turbulent Wind

•Run Time Performance