F2A User’s Guide
Yang Yang
Department of Maritime and Mechanical Engineering, Liverpool John Moores University
June 25, 2020
[email protected],
[email protected] Personal website: http://www.scholat.com/usstyyang.en
Contents
1 Introduction and acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 2
2 Basic use of F2A ............................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 Description of the input files for a simulation case ................................................................ 3
2.2 Running the simulation of the example .................................................................................. 5
1) Replace the user force DLL ............................................................................................ 5
2) Modify the input ............................................................................................................. 5
3) Modify the simulation time step/ duration ...................................................................... 6
4) Modify the environmental condition............................................................................... 7
5) Other notice ..................................................................................................................... 8
6) Run the simulation .......................................................................................................... 9
7) Extract the results .......................................................................................................... 11
3 Advantages and limitations of F2A ................................................................................................. 12
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1 Introduction and acknowledgements
This document is the user guide of F2A as a supplement material of the publication: Yang, Y.,
Bashir, M., Michailides, C., Li, C., & Wang, J. (2020). Development and application of an aero-hydro-
servo-elastic coupling framework for analysis of floating offshore wind turbines. Renewable
Energy,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2020.07.134.
F2A is an aero-hydro-servo-elastic tool developed based on AQWA by Yang Yang, a
postdoctoral research associate in Liverpool John Moores University for performing fully coupled
analysis of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWT). The aero-servo-elastic simulation capabilities
are fully implemented within the user_force64.dll which is a built-in DLL of AQWA for external
force calculation. For a coupled analysis of a floating offshore wind turbine subjected to wind, wave
and current loadings, the aerodynamic loads acting on the rotor, the elastic responses of the blades
and tower, and the servo-control are examined through the DLL, considering the influence from the
platform motions. The platform position, velocity and acceleration at each degree of freedom are
passed into the DLL to update the kinematics of the upper structures. Before being passed into DLL,
these terms are transformed from the inertial coordinate system to the local coordinate system of the
platform. Further details of the development of F2A are presented in the paper: Yang, Y., Bashir, M.,
Michailides, C., Li, C., & Wang, J. (2020). Development and application of an aero-hydro-servo-
elastic coupling framework for analysis of floating offshore wind turbines. Renewable
Energy,https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2020.07.134. Please cite this paper if F2A is involved in your
study.
This work is mainly supported by the ARCWIND project funded by the European Regional
Development Fund (ERDF), Interreg Atlantic Area (grant number: EAPA_344/2016). In addition,
financial support from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
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the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 730888 (RESET), Royal Society (grant number:
IEC\NSFC\170054), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers: 51676131,
51976131), Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (grant number:
1906052200) is greatly appreciated. The aero-servo-elastic simulation capabilities of F2A are mainly
based on an improved version of FASTv7. The author is very grateful for the open source tool
provided by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
2 Basic use of F2A
2.1 Description of the input files for a simulation case
F2A is based on AQWA and FAST. The platform and mooring lines are modelled in AQWA, and
the upper structures are defined in the required documents of FAST. In the repository of F2A, an
example of the NREL 5 MW wind turbine is included, as presented in Fig. 1. “AQWAHydroData”
folder contains the hydrodynamic data file with an extension of .hyd, which stores the frequency
domain solutions of the spar platform obtained using AQWA, as shown in Fig. 2. “FASTConfig”
folder contains the input files for FAST, including aerodynamic performance data of the airfoils,
structural properties of the blade and tower, and wind data, as presented in Fig. 3. The other files in
the folder of F2A are explained in Table 1.
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Fig. 1: Input files of F2A for the NREL 5 MW Spar wind turbine
Fig. 2: Hydrodynamic data of the platform
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Fig. 3: Input files of FAST
Table 1: Input files of F2A
InputFileForFAST2AQWA.txt Main input file of F2A, the filename cannot be changed
InputforreadAQWAResults_SingleFile.txt Input file for reading the results from the .LIS file which is
the output file of an analysis in AQWA
Spar_Turb_114.dat The case file of AQWA for the spar platform. This file is
generated using ANSYS-Workbench
Spar_Turb_114.fst Input file of FAST v7.
readAQWAResults_SingleFile.exe The executable file for reading the outputs of AQWA
user_force64.dll The user-force DLL, core of F2A.
2.2 Running the simulation of the example
It is very simple to the example case of F2A. The processes include:
1) Replace the user force DLL
Copy the DLL file in the repository (user_force64.dll) to the bin folder of installation directory
of AQWA. In my computer, the bin folder is “C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v190\aqwa\bin\winx64”.
Replace the default user_force64.dll by the DLL given here.
2) Modify the input
Open the main input of F2A (InputFileForFAST2AQWA.txt), ensure the definition of Prifile is
consistent with the filename of the .fst file. This is the main inputs of FAST, in which the aero-servo-
elastic properties are defined. Please note that the filename of “InputFileForFAST2AQWA.txt”
cannot be changed. But the variables defined in this file can be modified. For a coupled analysis,
please also ensure “CouplingFlag” is set to TRUE.
“IndexTwrStr” represents the ID of the structure defined in AQWA connecting to the tower
directly. In this example, only one structure is modelled in AQWA. Therefore, the integer variable is
set to 1.
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Fig. 4: Example of InputFileForFAST2AQWA.txt
3) Modify the simulation time step/ duration
The time step in solving the structural dynamics is allowed to be different with the time step of
analysis to solving the platform motions, which are defined in the .fst file and the .dat file, respectively,
as shown in Fig. 5. For the structural dynamics, it is suggested to use a time step no larger than 0.01
s. Here we used 0.005 s for this example. The time step defined in the AQWA input must be double
times of the time step defined in the .fst file. The default time step in AQWA is 0.1 s. According to
our sensitivity analysis of the time step, 0.1 s is small enough to avoid adverse effects due to non-
convergence. Please note that AQWA has a very rigorous requirement on the format of the input file.
Usually, each term occupies a length of 10 characters. Please keep this in mind when trying to make
a modification. The time duration of the analysis using F2A depends on the definition in the .dat file
only. The first value is the number of time steps, the second value is the time step. The third value is
the start time of the simulation, it is suggested to use 0 for this term.
(a) Time step/length in the .fst file for the solution of structural dynamics
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(b) Time step/length in the .dat file for the solution of platform motions
Fig. 5: Time step/length definition in the .fst file and .dat file
4) Modify the environmental condition
A regular wave and a turbulent wind are defined in the example. The wave properties are defined
in DECK 13. The wave amplitude is 0.9709 m, corresponding to a wave height of 1.9718 m. The
period of the regular wave is 5.0149 s and the wave direction is defined to 0 degree. If the user want
to examine an irregular wave condition, please re-generate the main input using ANSYS-Workbench
or make modifications according to the reference manual of AQWA based on this example file.
Wind condition is defined in the ADFile, where the directory of the wind data file is specified.
An input of TurbSim is also given in the wind data folder. The users can create the wind condition
they want. The wind condition defined in the example is a turbulent wind based on the IEC Kaimal
spectrum. The average wind speed at the hub height is 11.4 m/s.
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(a) Wave condition
(b) Wind condition
Fig. 6: Environmental conditions
5) Other notice
The input fst file is for an improved version of FAST v7. Three modules are added into the
original input of FASTv7. For the simulation using F2A, keep the current settings for the seismic
loading module, and the soil-structure interaction module. The Structural Control module can be
modified and applied into F2A. The DLL input can also be modified to make it more flexible in use.
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Fig. 7: Modified parts compared to the original version of FASTv7
6) Run the simulation
The simulation can be run in two different ways using F2A for the example. The first is the easier:
lunch aqwa.exe and select the .dat input file in the window. The simulation is running as follows:
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Fig. 8: Running the simulation in method 1
However, I prefer the second way to run the simulation, which is to run the simulation in the
promote command window. (i) Open a promote command window <Win + R>, type CMD and enter.
(ii)Go to the directory of the bin folder of AQWA; (iii) type aqwa.exe <space> directory of the input
file.
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Fig. 9: Running the simulation in method 2
7) Extract the results
The results stored in the .LIS file can be extracted using the code
(readAQWAResults_SingleFile.exe). The structure of the LIS file can be defined in the input file
“InputforreadAQWAResults_SingleFile.txt” whose name is not allowed to be modified. The LIS file
name, time duration and step must be defined appropriately. The platform position, velocity and
acceleration results will be stored in the files with a base of the NameBodies(i).
The result extraction code is written in FORTRAN. The source code of this tool can be found in
the source code repository.
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Fig. 10: Example input of the result extraction code
Fig. 11: Results of the example case
3 Advantages and limitations of F2A
F2A is the first tool based on AQWA for coupled analysis of floating offshore wind turbines.
The advantages of F2A compared to FAST come from the superiority of AQWA in predicting
hydrodynamic loads and mooring tensions. AQWA is capable of examining the interactions between
multiple floaters. However, FAST only can consider one floater, or treating the multiple floaters as
one unibody. For the modelling of multibody floating platform connected by flexible elements, F2A
has the unique advantages. Moreover, F2A can be used to investigate the transient dynamic behavior
of a floating wind turbine subjected to a sudden mooring breakage. The capability has not been
implemented within FAST yet. F2A is better in examining the dynamics of the platform.
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The current version of F2A is based on FASTv7. The BeamDyn and AeroDyn 15 modules, which
are more advanced structural and aerodynamic modules for the blades, respectively, have not been
integrated within AQWA. Therefore, compared to FAST, the aero-elastic responses of a larger wind
turbine predicted by F2A may not be as accurate as the results using FAST with the activations of
BeamDyn and AeroDyn 15.
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