The Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter and Afloat, with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control (ATLANTIS) program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) seeks to develop new technology pathways for the design of economically competitive Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs). Within ATLANTIS Topic Area 2 (Computer Tools), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its collaborators from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Colorado State University (CSU) have been awarded a project that will develop the Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS) toolset, with the goal of providing the offshore wind industry and research communities with an open-source, user-friendly, and flexible tool to enable true Controls Co-Design (CCD) of the FOWT physical design together with the controller. WEIS will utilize a multi-fidelity library of models built upon the foundations of WISDEM and OpenFAST (formerly known as FAST), developed by NREL via support the from U.S. DOE.This paper presents the WEIS development plan needed to progress to detailed planning and implementation in source code, including a summary of the existing physics and techno-economic modeling capabilities of WISDEM and OpenFAST, the functional requirements of WEIS (including improvements to WISDEM and OpenFAST) together with associated rationale for their establishment, and a qualitative description of the modeling approaches that will be implemented to address these functional requirements. Functional requirements that may be important for CCD of some FOWTs in the future but are outside the scope of the current effort are also summarized.The WEIS tool will generate system-optimal physical designs that enable innovative control solutions to stabilize highly flexible dynamics, reduce loads, and reveal design and control strategies that make possible new FOWT performance levels. WEIS will enable CCD optimization via nested and simultaneous approaches, modeling relevant physics / dynamics, critical couplings between components, and robust life-cycle techno-economics for a range of FOWT archetypes and control sensors and actuators. WEIS will enable system optimization at multiple fidelity levels: 1) the lowest level—implemented in the frequency domain—is intended for architecture exploration to generate creative new designs, 2) the mid-fidelity level—in the linearized time domain—promotes rigorous mathematical co-design optimization of controllers along with the other system components, and 3) the highest fidelity level—in the nonlinear time domain—enables final detailed co-design and verification through detailed simulation.Development of the WEIS toolset is guided by an External Advisory Board (EAB) with close collaboration between the ATLANTIS Topic Area 1 (New Designs) and Area 3 (Experiments) teams. The EAB will review the functional requirements and associated modeling approaches to ensure that they meet the most pressing needs for CCD of FOWTs.The mathematical details of specific modeling approaches, their implementation, verification, and validation, and applications will be presented in subsequent papers.

Functional Requirements for the WEIS Toolset to Enable Controls Co-Design of Floating Offshore Wind Turbines

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/OMAE/IOWTC2021/volume/84768

ASME 2021 International Offshore Wind Technical Conference (IOWTC2021)

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