SeaState WaveDT error in WEIS example 06 – works manually but fails in WEIS

[A-Bou23]

Dear community,

I'm trying to run the example 06_IEA-15-240-RWT monopile using WEIS on Pycharm. Everything seems to work fine until OpenFAST starts running, at which point I get the following error:

However, when I manually run the generated .fst file using the command line (outside of WEIS), the OpenFAST simulation completes successfully.

Initially, I suspected the issue might be related to file encoding. I tried manually re-encoding the SeaState file in UTF-8 in FAST_writer.py (as seen below):

PyCharm now shows the file as properly encoded in UTF-8. However, despite this fix, the error persists.

I’m puzzled, because the SeaState file generated by WEIS appears complete and syntactically correct and WaveDT is well defined (I renamed it from .dat to .txt for the sake of this discussion):

DLC1.1_0_weis_job_0_SeaState.txt

Moreover, it seems that all the examples I try running have the same error.

What could this be linked to ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Adèle

[gbarter]

Hello- We are not PyCharm users and it seems the issue is related with that IDE, not the WEIS code itself. I'm not sure we'll be able to help you.

[A-Bou23]

Thanks for your response.

But I get the same error when running weis from the anaconda prompt:

And when debugging, the FastLoadcases class in openmdao_openfast.py WaveDT is correctly read:

I'm not sure what this could be linked to.

[gbarter]

What version of OpenFAST are you using? The WEIS files are consistent with v4+ and the API does change from version to version.

[A-Bou23]

Currently I'm using OpenFAST-v4.0.2

[gbarter]

So, if you run the WEIS-generated files with OpenFAST directly they run fine, but if you let WEIS call OpenFAST it fails? Are you sure the OpenFAST package with WEIS and the manually invoked OpenFAST are the same?

[A-Bou23]

Dear @gbarter,

You were right — I was using a different version of OpenFAST when manually running the WEIS-generated files. I updated the openfast.exe to match the version I had been using, and now everything seems to work correctly.
That said, I was a bit surprised that the OpenFAST executable used by WEIS didn't work. I had assumed everything would be up to date with the installation, it may be due to an error I made with the environment, I'm not sure.

Thank you so much for your help!

[gbarter]

Glad to know there was an easy resolution. If openfast is installed as a conda package, it does have to be kept up-to-date with conda-commands as you sync with the latest changes in WEIS via git-commands. This happens to us all the time too.