National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers recently released an updated open-source version of FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS).

FLORIS is a set of controls and optimization tools used for wind farm control, and was developed at NREL and the Delft University of Technology. This tool models the turbine interactions in a wind power plant and can be used to perform real-time optimizations to improve wind plant performance and to integrate supervisory control and data acquisition data collected at wind plants. 

“FLORIS is designed to be a living code,” says NREL researcher and principal investigator Paul Fleming, who worked with researchers Jennifer Annoni and Rafael Mudafort to develop this version. “As we learn more about wake modeling and how to predict how wind farm controls impact the wakes, those models will appear in FLORIS.”

By utilizing FLORIS, wind farm developers can optimize their entire wind plant and estimate the impact of the changes on annual energy expenditure.

As a software, FLORIS is designed for both users and developers. For developers, FLORIS is an object-oriented modular framework that provides a standard method for improving existing models and adding new models. For those interested in using but not developing FLORIS, installing and executing the software has been simplified and documented.

Because of the living, open-source nature of the newly updated utility, NREL researchers hope other wind researchers will contribute improvements. “Our intention is to spur collaboration between other people,” says Fleming.