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.

Indices, tables and notes

[1]

At the most basic level PyTurbSim output is a four-dimensional array. The dimensions are:

  1. velocity component (size 3, corresponding to u,v,w),
  2. z spatial dimension (size n_z = number of z-points)
  3. y spatial dimension (size n_y = number of y-points)
  4. 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.