Welcome to PyTurbSim’s home page

PyTurbSim is a program for producing simulations of turbulent velocity time-series for input to device simulation tools that estimate water- and wind-turbine performance and loads. PyTurbSim outputs spatial time-series (a sequence of 2-D, y-z, planes) of 3-component velocity (u,v,w) that match statistics of real oceanic, riverine and wind turbulence [1]. In other words, PyTurbSim provides the inflow information that ‘drives’ device simulations. See the About page for more information.

PyTurbSim is the official water-turbulence simulation tool for hydrokinetic turbine device simulation (a.k.a. HydroTurbSim), and is also a valuable development and testing platform for NREL’s ‘TurbSim’ tool (see History). New mean-profile, spectral and coherence models can be implemented easily in a pythonic, object-oriented manner, and plotting routines for comparing output to targets and/or data are included.

Table of Contents

• About
  • History
  • License
• Download and Install
  • Installing without pip
  • Windows Installation Issues
• Usage
  • 1) Input files
  • 2) Advanced programming interface (API)
  • Reading output files
• Plotting Tools
  • Generate some PyTurbSim data
  • Basic plotting
  • Advanced Usage
• Code Framework
  • Models vs. run-specific ‘statistics’
    • Models
    • Stat-objects/arrays
  • Customizing PyTurbSim
• pyts package
  • Subpackages
    • pyts.cohereModels package
    • pyts.io package
    • pyts.phaseModels package
    • pyts.plot package
    • pyts.profModels package
    • pyts.runInput package
    • pyts.specModels package
    • pyts.stressModels package
  • Submodules
  • pyts.api module
  • pyts.base module
  • pyts.dbg module
  • pyts.main module
  • pyts.misc module
  • pyts.pyts_numpy module
  • Module contents
• Glossary

Indices, tables and notes

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page
• Glossary

[1]

At the most basic level PyTurbSim output is a four-dimensional array. The dimensions are: velocity component (size 3, corresponding to u,v,w), z spatial dimension (size n_z = number of z-points) y spatial dimension (size n_y = number of y-points) time dimension (size n_t = number of timesteps) TurbSim implicitly makes the ‘frozen flow hypothesis’ and so the time-dimension can also, roughly, be considered the x spatial dimension.