Your first simulation

End-to-end walk from a fresh login to a time-series chart, using the bundled NREL 5 MW demo and a 60-second steady-wind inflow. Expected wall-clock: 2–5 minutes, mostly waiting on OpenFAST.

1. Create a study

From the dashboard, click New Study. Pick Single Simulation, give it a name (it's required — e.g. nrel-5mw smoke test), and click Start Single Simulation. You land in the study workbench on the Turbine tab.

2. Pick a turbine

The Turbine tab shows the full Turbine Library — five reference designs are auto-loaded into your org on first visit (NREL-5MW-Land, IEA-15-240-RWT-Onshore, IEA-15-240-RWT-Monopile, IEA-15-240-RWT-UMaineSemi, IEA-22-280-RWT-Onshore), split into Onshore / Offshore sections. Click any card to attach it to this study. Use the 3D button to preview the geometry — offshore variants render with the right foundation (monopile pile, floating semi-sub) and you can download a PNG of the current frame.

For this walk we'll pick NREL-5MW-Land. If you want to customise an existing demo, click View → Clone as New on its card; the editable copy lands in Your Turbines with a (copy) suffix and the Edit pencil enabled.

3. Pick an inflow

The Inflow step for single mode lets you describe one wind condition. For the fastest run pick Steady wind, 10 m/s, 60 s simulation time, then continue.

If you want turbulent flow, switch to TurbSimand the form will expose the IEC turbulence category, grid dimensions, and time step. Don't feel obliged to tune these for a first run — the defaults match IEC-A at the hub height of the selected turbine.

4. Submit the run

Switch to the Run tab. The page summarises the configuration you chose (turbine, wind condition). The Advanced tab is where you override any flags from the main .fst — for the smoke test, leave them all at Use file default.

Click Run Single Simulation. The backend:

• auto-creates a minimal environmental config matching the wind;
• auto-creates a single-point DLC case (one wind speed, one seed);
• submits the batch to the simulations:fast queue.

A Progresscard appears immediately. Once the worker picks up the job you'll see a live sim-time bar updating every 2 seconds, plus a wall-clock estimate.

5. View results

When status flips to COMPLETED, click View results → (or the Results tab in the workbench). The Results tab loads channels and drops you on the Time Series view.

Things to try from here:

• Pick a channel in the left rail (e.g. GenPwr, RotSpeed, BldPitch1) — the plot appears on the right.
• Switch to Basic Statistics for min / mean / max / std of each selected channel.
• Switch to Power Spectrum for an FFT of the current channel.
• Click the Export button (top-right of the analysis pane) to grab the raw .outb, the current chart as PNG, or a curl snippet you can paste into a script.

Troubleshooting

Job stays pending

The fast lane caps concurrent jobs per org (5 by default). If another user is mid-run you'll sit in the queue for a bit. The Run page shows queue position. If you're still waiting after a minute or two, check status.turbinex.app for a worker-lane outage.

Job fails immediately

Click View error on the failure banner — the backend captures OpenFAST stderr. For demo turbines the common cause is a stale batch from a previous study sitting in the page; switch studies or refresh.

Results page says “No job found for this study yet”

Means the study has a studyId but no submitted batch, or the batch belongs to a deleted study on a different browser. Head back to Run Analysis and click Re-run with current settings.

Next steps

Once the single-sim flow feels natural, move on to a certification study (guide) or sweep a parameter (guide). Both reuse the same Turbine and Inflow steps you just walked through.