A modular approach to Wind Farm Simulation using Functional Mock-Up Units for Co-Simulation

The development and design of renewable energy systems relies on system simulations to evaluate constantly changing environments and new requirements. This can require the extension or development of new simulation models, which is a time consuming effort, making reusing models desirable. However, this flexibility is not always given in existing tools. Co-Simulation provides a technique to overcome these issues, but it has not been applied yet for aero-elastic simulation of wind farms. This study investigates how co-simulation techniques can be applied to create modular simulations of wind farms. We utilize functional mock-up units as a model base to wrap existing models as components for a wind farm simulation framework, which we call farmQSim. Additionally, a continuously generating wind model is used to remove the necessity of a precursor wind generating model. The wind farm co-simulation approach shows a good match with results from FAST.farm and allows for flexible setup of simulation. Models of different complexity can be combined into a single simulation case to decrease simulation time while achieving comparable results. Overall, co-simulation has been proven to be suitable for wind farm simulations and therefore enables reusability of simulation models and provides extensibility of the simulation cases.