Researchers at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have developed FAST.Farm, a new modeling tool for predicting the power performance and structural loads of wind turbines within a wind farm. An extension of the OpenFAST open-source wind turbine engineering tool, FAST.Farm considers the physics of farm-wide ambient wind in the layer of the atmosphere in which wind turbines operate, changes in wake shape with downstream distance, wake movements caused by background turbulence, and farm-wide control. With FAST.Farm, users can simulate the conditions each turbine in a wind farm will need to withstand throughout its lifetime, or they can start fresh and design an entire wind farm to achieve minimal structural load and maximum power production.

FAST.Farm is now available through OpenFAST on GitHub.