Free CFD calculation of complex terrain site - Introducing WAsP CFD

[Brian Ohrbeck Hansen]

Dear WAsP user,

You are hereby offered a free Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculation of a complex terrain site!

As you possibly already know the WAsP team is currently working on a fundamentally new approach to CFD for wind resource assessment in complex terrain. We call it “WAsP CFD” and it combines the strengths of WAsP with the strengths of CFD in the WAsP graphical user interface that you already know.

WAsP CFD will be demonstrated at EWEA 2012 in Copenhagen and testing is already ongoing. As the WAsP team would like WAsP CFD to become very valuable to you, we would appreciate to know what you think about it in the present version (e.g. the general concept of an on-line CFD service, our implementation of it, the graphical user interface and the results). Therefore, we would like to meet with you for a personal demonstration at our EWEA 2012 exhibition stand (C1-B48). In order to give you a better impression of what you can do with WAsP CFD, we could discuss a site that you have recently analyzed with WAsP – so we offer to calculate one of your complex terrain sites using WAsP CFD.

If you will be attending EWEA 2012 and would like a free CFD calculation of a complex terrain site that you have recently analyzed with WAsP, then simply email us your WAsP workspace no later than 31st March. In the email subject please type “WAsP workspace for WAsP CFD at EWEA 2012”. Your workspace may contain any normal WAsP elements but should as a minimum include a vector map with height contours as well as roughness lines – and we also need an indication of the target area. Please note that we cannot promise to calculate all sites received but we will take as many as possible in the order we get them. All received information will of course be treated as confidential.

We hope that you find this offer interesting and that you will be as excited about WAsP CFD as we are!


Best regards,

The WAsP team

[Brian Ohrbeck Hansen]

During a two-week period before EWEA 2012, the WAsP Team received WAsP workspaces from 41 different companies that were going to be attending EWEA 2012 and would like a free CFD calculation of a complex terrain site. Additionally, we also received responses from a number of companies that were not going to attend EWEA 2012. The interest that was shown for our new product was truly overwhelming and so we did not have enough time to calculate all WAsP workspaces received.

The WAsP Team did calculate 19 out of 41 received WAsP workspaces. In total, we made approximately 2500 Ellipsys3D CFD calculations (19 WAsP workspaces times 1-3 target areas times 36 directions) in 10 days. Out of these 2500 fully automated CFD calculations, approximately 99% converged and gave good results without any problems. Only one site caused convergence problems for approximately 1% of our CFD calculations. However, this was due to crossing height contour lines in the provided WAsP map file and was easily fixed.

During EWEA 2012 the WAsP team made personal demonstrations of WAsP CFD for the calculated WAsP workspaces. We also talked to a lot of wind & site engineers, CFD experts and other people who are interested in WAsP CFD. Far the most of them were very impressed with what we have made so far. However, we also received some valuable feedback which we will use to make improvements.

After this exercise of putting WAsP CFD to the test, we are even more confident that we are making a new product that will become valuable to you!