Wind turbine site suitability tool

Building on decades of site specific load assessment experience, DNV’s Site suitability tool (SST) helps to bring your site-specific loads to life to enhance onshore and offshore wind turbine project evaluation.

The tool in a nutshell
Our Site Suitability Tool (SST) allows customers to instantly investigate a pre-calculated database of extreme and fatigue loads. Based on the customers choice of a single or a selection of wind turbines, loads information can be estimated and packaged into the user-friendly interface.

Wind turbine flexibility
The tool has a user interface to aid data input but can also be run directly as a windows command line executable program.

Thanks to its flexibility through its integration with Bladed, the industry standard turbine design software, and any other aero-elastic simulation codes, the tool can be built for specific wind turbines models or for generic machines with parameters agreed and set by you.

For each turbine model, environmental variables of turbulence, shear, upflow, air density and wind speed can be customized and taken into account to generate the database.

In addition to reporting load margins, the output format displays a graphical traffic-light results system which displays:

• Green - if all site loads are within design limits.
• Orange - if some are outside of design limits, but are within a certain range and are not key components.
• Red - if key component design limits are exceeded by a specified level.

Some of the key capabilities include:

• Suitability of all turbines within a project can be calculated in one step.
• Wind sector management strategies can be investigated and tailored to optimise site-specific loading
• Full results can be reported into an output file and easily shared.
• Time spent in neighbouring wakes and Frandsen effective turbulence for database interrogation can be computed.

Evaluating experience
DNV’s Turbine Engineering Support team has been delivering site suitability services to enhance project evaluation for nearly two decades. Our local engineers combine project experience and understanding of turbine modelling and analysis of external conditions, providing you with the real insight that you need.