openfast / acdc

ACDC: Automated Campbell Diagram Code

ACDC: Automated Campbell Diagram Capabilities

This application provides a web-based graphical user interface to generating Campbell Diagrams and visualizing mode shapes for OpenFAST turbine models.

Current State

This software is currently under development, but is usable for some turbine models.

Documentation

Documentation is available on Github Pages.

Installation

Executables can be downloaded for Windows, MacOS, and Linux from the Releases page of this repository. Refer to installation instructions for detailed information.

Issues

Please open issues on Github if you encounter problems with the software. If possible, provide a minimal case and instructions to reproduce the failure.

acdc's Issues

Indicate if steady-state is reached during evaluation

In the Evaluate section, progress bars are displayed during the time domain simulation. If the steady-state calculation fails to converge, then OpenFAST will perform the linearization with the data available, which can lead to bad results if the simulation is not close to steady state. However, there is no indication to the user if steady-state convergence is reached.

This issue proposes adding a feature that indicates to the user if the steady-state convergence does not occur. An initial thought would be to turn the time domain simulation progress bar to a different color, like yellow, to warn the user that the linearization results for that operating point may not be correct.

Request: SubDyn in visualization

I am modeling a tower in SubDyn and I have linearized this model using acdc. I now want to visualize the modes, and I have added hydrodynamic coefficients (of zero) to the SubDyn members above sea level, because I want to visualize the SubDyn tower as well.

The first question is: Is it necessary to use HydroDyn to visualize SubDyn, or is acdc capable of including the SubDyn tower in the visualization files without this HydroDyn-hack?

The second question (issue) is: Whereas the blades and ElastoDyn-part of the model look really good, the tower, now modeled in SubDyn, shows up as a bunch of yellow lines not moving (see image below). Is it possible to make acdc also visualize the motions of the SubDyn tower (with or without HydroDyn)?

When I look at the model in Paraview, using the vtk-files generated by acdc, the SubDyn tower is also moving similarly to the ElastoDyn-components, as I want it to do.

vtk_fps input must be integer not decimal in .fst-file

Description

I have had an issue in which I was able to run acdc with one set of input files, but it crashing with another set of input files. Specifically, acdc failed to import the input files in one of the cases. After some systematic comparison, I found that if the variable "VTK_fps" in the .fst-file was set to "15.0", acdc failed to read .fst-file and import input file, whereas if the variable was set to "15", acdc is able to import the input files. I don't see why the frame rate has to be an integer, and there was no error message, so it was difficult to track down what was wrong.

Steps to reproduce issue

The following input made the simulations crash:

---------------------- VISUALIZATION ------------------------------------------
0 WrVTK - VTK visualization data output: (switch) {0=none; 1=initialization data only; 2=animation}
2 VTK_type - Type of VTK visualization data: (switch) {1=surfaces; 2=basic meshes (lines/points); 3=all meshes (debug)} [unused if WrVTK=0]
False VTK_fields - Write mesh fields to VTK data files? (flag) {true/false} [unused if WrVTK=0]
15.0 VTK_fps - Frame rate for VTK output (frames per second){will use closest integer multiple of DT} [used only if WrVTK=2]

Current behavior

In the "Model"-tab, there is no list of input files after opening the .fst-file. Furthermore, acdc crashes when trying to run simulations.

Expected behavior

When importing an .fst-file, the imported input files should be listed and the simulations should run without crashing.