AMR-Wind

AMR-Wind is a massively parallel, block-structured adaptive-mesh, incompressible flow solver for wind turbine and wind farm simulations. The codebase is a wind-focused fork of incflo. The solver is built on top of the AMReX library. AMReX library provides the mesh data structures, mesh adaptivity, as well as the linear solvers used for solving the governing equations. AMR-Wind is actively developed and maintained by a dedicated multi-institutional team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.

The primary applications for AMR-Wind are: performing large-eddy simulations (LES) of atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) flows, simulating wind farm turbine-wake interactions using actuator disk or actuator line models for turbines, and as a background solver when coupled with a near-body solver (e.g., Nalu-Wind) with overset methodology to perform blade-resolved simulations of multiple wind turbines within a wind farm. For offshore applications, the ability to model the air-sea interaction effects and its impact on the ABL characteristics is another focus for the code development effort. As with other codes in the Exawind ecosystem, AMR-wind shares the following objectives:

  • an open, well-documented implementation of the state-of-the-art computational models for modeling wind farm flow physics at various fidelities that are backed by a comprehensive verification and validation (V&V) process (Capabilities and Roadmap);

  • be capable of performing the highest-fidelity simulations of flow fields within wind farms; and

  • be able to leverage the high-performance leadership class computing facilities available at DOE national laboratories.

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