NWTF Facility Showcases Wind Farm Innovation During Ministerial Visit
On Friday 5 June, Dr Kevin Gouder, Professor Mike Graham, and partners from Ghent University met a high-level delegation at Imperial College London, including Lord Patrick Vallance (UK Minister for Science), Marc Lemaître (European Commission Director-General for Research and Innovation), and Isabell Poppelbaum (EU Deputy Ambassador to the UK). They were joined by Imperial’s President Hugh Brady and Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise, Mary Ryan.
Dr Gouder presented Project ICONIC (Smart, Aware, Integrated Wind Farm Control Interacting with Digital Twins), a Horizon project funded by the European Union, Innovate UK, and the Swiss Innovation Agency.
ICONIC is advancing wind farm aerodynamics by moving from ‘greedy’ turbine operation to coordinated control, where turbines work together to increase power output and reduce load, through, for example, wake steering.
Imperial’s 10’x5′ Wind Tunnel — an NWTF facility — supports this work by providing high-quality data for machine learning and AI model development and validation, and by running a proof-of-concept experiment, prepared by Dr Craig Thompson, using a scale model wind farm to demonstrate coordinated control in practice.
