Wind farm layout optimization system using 3-dimensional computational fluid dynamics by GPU accelerators

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to optimize the turbine layout of wind farms. We have made use of the 3 dimensional CFD simulation to replace the wake superposition model, which makes the present study substantially different from the existing works. The CFD computation, which is the most time-consuming part and has been thought not affordable in a genetic algorithm (GA) based optimization system, is accelerated by GPUs. We have developed an automatic system for wind farm layout optimization on the Tsubame 2.0 supercomputer which is equipped with massive GPUs, and demonstrated that the implementation of the 3D CFD simulations in a GA optimization computation is practically possible if the CFD can be solved on GPUs at a speed dozens of times faster.