Computer-Aided Engineering Tools

SOWFA (Simulator for Offshore Wind Farm Applications) is a computational fluid dynamics solver based on OpenFOAM coupled with FAST which allows users to investigate wind turbine performance under variables atmospheric conditions.

• Atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) solver
• Wind farm solver with standard actuator line
• Large eddy simulation (no temperature equation) with FAST actuator line
• Wind farm solver FAST actuator line (beta version)
• Specific boundary conditions class
• Standard actuator line class
• FAST actuator line class

• Utility to set ABL IC's and BC's
• Utility to change sampled boundary files to input files for wind farm upstream BC's

• Precursor simulation of atmospheric boundary layer
• Wind farm simulation of 48 NREL 5MW turbines using standard actuator line
• Four NREL 5MW reference wind turbine using FAST actuator line
• ABL simulation with 2 NREL 5MW turbines using FAST actuator line (beta version)

Online Webinar/tutorial (presented May 5, 2012)

• Slides:                 SOWFA_webinar_05-03-2012.pdf (2.1 MB)
• Video with slides: SOWFA_webinar_05-03-2012.wmv (29.8 MB)

download the following files from our server:

• SOWFA Archive (v1.0.1-alpha, 4.0MB,07-May-2012)

  This is an archive of SOWFA. It contains the SOWFA source code. Currently, SOWFA is only supported for Linux operating systems. 

If you want to refer to the SOWFA website in a report, here is a reference you can use:

NWTC Design Codes (SOWFA by Matt Churchfield and Sang Lee).  http://wind.nrel.gov/designcodes/simulators/SOWFA/.  Last modified 14-March-2012; accessed 14-March-2012.