Sunset on Wind Turbines

The two CFD simulations to compute the wake from the wind turbines were performed using the high-order finite-difference flow solver XCompact3D (https://www.incompact3d.com). The simulations were run on ARCHER2, the UK's national HPC service (https://www.archer2.ac.uk). A precursor simulation was run to generate the neutral atmospheric boundary layer. The wind turbine simulations were run with a billion mesh points for 20,000 iterations before collecting the flow field.

We used ParaView for the initial postprocessing of the CFD simulation's velocity data to compute the Q-criterion. The final video was made using Blender, including the simulation of the ocean. The representation of the sky uses an HDRi from Poly Haven, "The Sky Is On Fire" by Greg Zaal and Rico Cilliers (see https://polyhaven.com/a/the_sky_is_on_fire).

The video has a total of 590 frames and took 14 hours to render on a workstation with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7985WX (64 cores), six NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs (512GB DDR5), and four Samsung 990 PRO 4TB NVMe SSDs.