Deriving the equations of motion of a wind turbine using SymPy

Why do I even bother?

• Can be an interesting framework for a master course or assignments for master projects

• How does SymPy compares to Maple for this particular case

• Project idea: automatically generating the equations of motions for a wind turbine

  • Additional tools in SymPy/Theano can optimize large mathematical expressions and convert to C

  • GPU support, can it go faster?

The original assignment

• Starting point: course assignment done during master at TU Delft:

  • derive equation of motions with Maple

  • export solution to Matlab and solve numerically

Same old with other tools

• Open source vs black box

• Develop in one environment (Python) instead of two (Matlab+Maple)

• Parse Maple commands to Python/SymPy commands using pyparsing:

  • Define the parsing grammer

  • Can be usefull in other cases: parsing HAWC2, FAST, Bladed, ... input files

• Increase robustness: Fall-back to other libraries for mathematical processing in Python: maxima, GiNaC, ...