With the increase of their size and the growing tendency to place them offshore, wind turbines have been the subject of an intense race for innovation. Simulation tools are increasingly following this trend. SAMCEF Wind Turbines is in that frame bringing innovations to the various fields of wind turbines design. SAMCEF Wind Turbines (can be used at different stages in the wind turbine engineering process and by different engineering teams (loads departments, transmission groups, component teams, integration programs...). A combination of dedicated graphical user interfaces and the high performance solver SAMCEF Mecano makes SAMCEF Wind Turbines perfectly suited to simulate flexible dynamics phenomena with high accuracy.
Forty years of experience in modeling large flexible machines and ten years expertise in wind energy have been incorporated into a platform fully dedicated to Wind Turbine simulation: SAMCEF for Wind Turbines.
SAMCEF Wind Turbines can be used in different contexts depending on the targeted application:
- Load assessment
- using simple models for fast computations
- using more detailed models for higher accuracy, the latter is used on the ultimate load cases which are determined using simple models
- Mechanical components design (yaw, gearbox...) based on the Multi-Body Simulation features of SAMCEF Wind Turbines
- Structural components design (bedplate...) based on the Finite Elements features of SAMCEF Wind Turbines
SAMCEF Wind Turbines comes with two Graphical User Interfaces:
- SAMCEF Wind Turbines Desktop: includes pre-embedded, parameterized, global configurations that have been industrially validated for a range of turbines. Different models with varying levels of complexity exist for most components as well as pre-embedded certification load cases. Being an open platform, new concepts for any number of components can be easily integrated (gearless and offshore turbines are therefore easily modeled);
- SAMCEF Wind Turbines Modeler: a generic FEA pre-processor. It can be used to build your own models of single components. These models can then be prepared to be automatically assembled with existing global models inside SAMCEF Wind Turbines Desktop. This interface can also be used to run local analyses on the same components based on loads computed in SAMCEF Wind Turbines Desktop.
SAMCEF Mecano is a generic non-linear Finite Elements solver including Multi Body Simulation features perfectly suited for dynamic analyses of large flexible structures. Local or global modal analyses can be run from SAMCEF Wind Turbines to compute resonance frequencies and corresponding mode shapes of single components as well as of those of complete turbines.
Dedicated post-processing tools include time plots, trajectories, spectrogram diagrams (waterfalls), extraction of ultimate loads... in addition to specific export bridges to post process your results using Flex 5 or Matlab. Specific tools deduce fatigue, durability and extreme loads from load time histories of thousands of load cases..
