Open AccessSuperelement reduction of substructures for sequential load calculations in OpenFAST
Author(s) -
Emmanuel Branlard,
Matt Shields,
Benjamin Anderson,
Rick Damiani,
Fabian Wendt,
Jason Jonkman,
W. Musiał,
Brian S. Foley
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/1452/1/012033
Subject(s) - substructure , degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry) , superelement , reduction (mathematics) , code (set theory) , tower , computer science , engineering , structural engineering , finite element method , mathematics , set (abstract data type) , programming language , physics , finite element limit analysis , geometry , quantum mechanics , extended finite element method
This article presents the superelement formulation newly implemented in OpenFAST to simulate fixed-bottom substructures with a reduced-order model similar to a common industry practice. The Guyan and Craig-Bampton methods are used to reduce the number of degrees of freedom and generate a so-called “superelement”. The formulation allows manufacturers to exchange such superelements to perform load calculations without revealing sensitive information about the support structure (e.g., foundation, substructure, and/or tower) or turbine. The source code is made publicly available in the OpenFAST repository. Test cases with varying degrees of complexity are presented to validate the technique, and accuracy issues are discussed.