License Information
Do I Need a Commercial License?
| User Type | Purpose / Application | Academic Public License (QBlade-CE) | Commercial License (QBlade-EE) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private Individual | Personal, non-commercial, non-profit | ✓ | |
| School / University | Courses, teaching, labs | ✓ | |
| Student | Coursework / thesis / homework | ✓ | |
| Researcher (at university or equivalent) | Non-commercial academic and fully public funded research | ✓ | |
| Researcher (at university or equivalent) | Research in cooperation with industry or involving industry funding | ✓ | |
| Enterprise / Company / Consultant | Software evaluation | ✓ | |
| Enterprise / Company / Consultant | Research or commercial projects | ✓ |
What are the differences? QBlade-CE vs. QBlade-EE
| Feature | QBlade Community Edition | QBlade Enterprise Edition |
|---|---|---|
| License Type | Academic Public License | Commercial License |
| Commercial Use Allowed | no | yes |
| Included software training | no | yes |
| Support | user’s forum | dedicated on-demand support |
| Source Code Avaliability | public | closed |
| Aero-Hydro-Elastic Modelling | yes | yes |
| Wind and Wave Generation | yes | yes |
| Graphical User Interface | yes | yes |
| Text Based Object Import and Export | yes | yes |
| Software in Loop (SIL) Interface | yes | yes |
| Modal Analysis, Campbell Diagram, Aeroelastic Power Curve | no | yes |
| Higher Order Particle Wake Aerodynamics | no | yes |
| Multi-Rotor Turbine Design | no | yes |
| Multi-Turbine Windpark Simulations | no | yes |
| IEC Compliant DLC Preprocessor (61400-1, 61400-2, 61400-3, 61400-2-3) | no | yes |
| Command Line Interface & Batch Automation | no | yes |
| Full Parallelization and Optimized Libraries | no | yes |
| Real World Performance | ~ 1x real time at 20Hz | ~ 30x real time at 20Hz |
QBlade Community Edition
QBlade Community Edition (QBlade-CE) is freely distributed under the Academic Public License, with publicly available source code. The usage of QBlade-CE is restricted to non-commercial, or evaluation purposes. The community edition of QBlade contains the full functionality to perform aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulations of wind turbine systems without any limitations. All modules for airfoil design, blade design, turbine design, wind and wave preprocessors and post-processing are available to all non-commercial users. Each of the multi-physics models in QBlade-CE is fully equivalent to the implementation in QBlade-EE. QBlade-CE also serves as an evaluation version for commercial users that are interested in QBlade-EE as a way to test if QBlade works in their professional environment!
QBlade Enterprise Edition
QBlade Enterprise Edition (QBlade-EE) is distributed as closed source, under a commercial license, which can be obtained for which annual or perpetual subscriptions are available and professional user support and training packages are offered. The Enterprise Edition of QBlade includes several essential, practical and timesaving addons and improvements for a production-ready application by commercial users, such as automation, scripting, and dramatically increased performance. All the added and extended functionality serves the purpose to make QBlade-EE a readily applicable and ideal tool for IEC compliant certification calculations and system designs. With QBlade-EE wind turbine design & certification can now be performed in a highly intuitive user interface with unprecedented numerical accuracy and efficiency. Higher accuracy, and lower uncertainty in load predictions translates to more efficient on-point wind turbine, substructure, and controller designs and greatly contributes to overall cost savings. The unprecedented numerical evaluation speed reduces the overall time of design iterations and evaluations and increases productivity.