Simulators for Wind Turbines

Abstract – A simulator’s development includes four types of tasks: a) the high level design (splitting the system to simulate in subsystems and writing their specifications); b) the design of the user interface (HMI); c) the actual coding; d) testing.

We have been in the position of coding the Simulator for a wind turbine, its target been to exercise every possible condition (environmental, possible faults, etc) that its controller may encounter. We were faced  the decision of which software framework to use, as we knew that visual and dataflow programming frameworks, while complete and very well proven, would force as to depend heavily on the availability of the experts on each field involved (several persons), situation that we knew would be unlike to happen.  

This communication shows how we solve this problem using a different approach, that turned out to have a number of benefits, basically: a) use of personnel with more common programming background (Visual C, Visual Basic) (then lower cost); b) a cheaper method for writing the specifications; c) independent testing of each module; d) deferring the construction of the final program to “wiring the modules”, done by the experts, without recompiling.