What is Ashes?
Ashes is a software that performs integrated analyses of onshore and offshore wind turbines. Since the beginning, a main focus for Ashes has been to provide the best user experience possible while at the same time still producing excellent numerical results.
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Ashes features:
An intuitive, modern and user friendly interface
We believe that following existing best practices for modern user interfaces is essential to producing software that is effective in use. You as the user should not have to study intricate manuals in order to getting started. Instead, we want to make the software itself function as a learning tool, not only for the design process, but also for the theory of wind turbine design.
Real-time 3-D visualization
Ashes visualizes wind and wave loads and the resulting response of the wind turbine in a live, real-time manner during simulations. At any time, the simulation speed can be increased or decreased and different parts can be studied close-up. This makes Ashes an excellent tool for students and teachers learning and teaching wind turbine theory.
Model templates
Ashes provides a set of built-in templates that enables you to quickly create a wind turbine model which can be further customized. Airfoil data for a set of commonly used airfoils is integrated into Ashes, and these can be used when defining the blades on the turbine. Common designs of offshore floating or bottom-fixed turbines, or designs with a gravity-based foundation can be created on a whim.
Advanced integrated analyses
A fully integrated simulation of a wind turbine in Ashes includes loads such as wind loads, sea waves, gravity, buoyancy, and generator loads. Arbitrarily large motions of the full structure can be simulated accurately, which is specially important in the design of floaters. Ashes is capable of modeling flexible blades, thus including effects that are becoming increasingly important in today’s larger and more slender designs. Both the built-in control system or an external one can be used to control the generator and pitch/yaw actuators.
Data generated during the simulation is gathered in a collection of sensors, where each individual time series can be viewed live in graphs.
Efficient parallel jobs
Ashes takes advantage of all the available processing resources on your computer, and executes a set of analyses simultaneously such that the total running time is reduced to a minimum. This is important when a high number of load cases should be simulated when verifying against design standards. Batches of jobs can be generated automatically, for instance for the design load cases in the IEC design standard.
