The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Wind Energy Controls Research Team announced the release of Version 3.0 of the FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS) wind farm controls software. FLORIS optimizes flow control strategies so that existing wind energy facilities can improve productivity and future projects can maximize profits.

“This version of the open-source software represents a major redesign, rewrite, and enhancement,” said Paul Fleming, NREL researcher and principal investigator. “It’s much faster—100 times faster than Version 2.1 and 30 times faster than Version 2.4. It’s also more accurate and supports more varied computations.”

Some of the most significant improvements that are now available to academics, manufacturers, developers, and small businesses include:

• Improved computation speeds for calculating wind farm annual energy production
• Enhanced offshore wind farm models
• Mixed-turbine-model capabilities
• FLORIS-based Analysis for Supervisory Control (FLASC) companion repository.

The release of FLORIS Version 3.0 comes after a six-week beta-testing period, during which additional features were added and minor bugs were fixed—but there is more to come.

“Ongoing development of FLORIS continues,” Fleming said. “We’re planning several new features, including even greater computational speed, the ability to couple to hybrid plant models, continuous improvement to wake models, and modeling of axial-induction-based wind farm controllers.”

FLORIS was 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.

For more information, including installation instructions and a quick-start guide, visit the FLORIS web page. Learn more about wind energy research and tools at NREL, and subscribe to NREL's wind energy newsletter.