FLORIS: FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State
FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS) is an open-source wind plant optimization tool.
NREL's capabilities in wind farm control span the process of designing, implementing, and validating wind farm controllers. NREL's real-time wind farm control strategies enable entire plants to adjust to changing wind directions and other conditions via data sharing among turbines.
An essential tool, FLORIS enables existing wind energy facilities to improve productivity and future projects to maximize profits by optimizing flow control strategies, like wake steering. At NREL, researchers use FLORIS to help our partners develop site-specific, optimized flow control strategies that increase productivity, and the tool's performance analysis capabilities demonstrate the impacts of implementing controls and identify potential areas for improvement.
The latest version of the open-source FLORIS platform is available for download and collaborative development. In addition, NREL's flow control experts are accessible to academia, manufacturers, developers, and small businesses through multiple partnering formats.
FLORIS is developed by NREL and Delft University of Technology with support from the U.S. Department of Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office. Funding was also provided by the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium.
Latest Version
FLORIS Version 3.0, released in February 2022, represents a major redesign, rewrite, and enhancement of the open-source software to allow for faster, more accurate, and more varied computations with the several significant improvements for academics, manufacturers, developers, and small businesses.
Version 3.0 has improved computation speeds. New algorithms enable improved memory usage and reduce the number of mathematical operations required while the ability to leverage a larger portion of a computer's processor allows multiple mathematical operations to be performed at the same time. A complete redesign of the software architecture makes FLORIS Version 3.0 better modularized to foster collaboration and adoption of more modern software best practices.
The new cumulative curl model, developed in collaboration with the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium, improves the accuracy of FLORIS's wake models for large offshore wind farms. This includes a new cumulative model for wake superposition.
The new framework of FLORIS Version 3.0 now includes heterogeneous inflow and mixed-turbine-model capabilities, allowing for specification of different wind speeds in three dimensions and every wind direction. Additionally, a new library of reference wind turbines and support for various wind turbine models is now available within a single simulation, which enables layout optimizations based on speed-up areas as well as arbitrary inflow profile modeling.
Also making its debut is the FLORIS-based Analysis for Supervisory Control and data acquisition (SCADA), called FLASC, for field data postprocessing, model analysis, and FLORIS-to-SCADA (a companion, open-source repository) data comparison.
Future Work
Ongoing work continues to evaluate and develop ways to improve FLORIS to enable coupling with hybrid power plant models, build controller modeling, improve wake modeling, and improve user experience with increased computation speed and potential web-based dashboards.
The team is open to and appreciative of user feedback. If you have input on the tool or would like to receive notifications of updates, version launches, and more, please email the team contact.