FLOW Project Presents Latest Research at Torque 2026 in Bruges

From 3rd to 5th June 2026, Bruges hosted Torque 2026, one of the wind energy sector's leading scientific conferences, and FLOW was well represented throughout. Across parallel sessions and poster sessions, partners from across the consortium presented three years of research to an audience of fellow scientists, engineers, and industry specialists working directly on wind farm performance.

FLOW's contributions opened with the Wind Farm Performance II session, where Johan Meyers, Naveen Kethavath, and Koen Devesse presented the validation of a blockage-corrected wake model against real operational power data from the Belgian-Dutch wind farm cluster. Validating a model against live operational data, rather than idealized conditions alone, is what gives a modelling approach genuine credibility, and that was the core contribution of this work.

In the Measurement Techniques for Wind and Turbulence session, Julia Gottschal presented new research on estimating vertical and lateral wind coherence using three synchronized continuous-wave lidars. Characterizing how turbulence behaves across space remains a demanding measurement challenge, and this approach provided a more precise method for doing so.

Antoine Mathieu presented in the Wind Resource Assessment, Forecasting and Economic Impact session, sharing an approach to clustering multi-year mesoscale data for wind resource assessment in complex terrain. The work addressed how to structure large volumes of atmospheric data in a way that remains useful for resource assessment, even where terrain complexity makes that data harder to interpret.

In the Wind Farm Performance III session, Laurent Beaudet presented a SCADA-driven unsteady background flow model for wind farm flow and turbine wake simulations, built on the principle that operational turbine data, rather than idealized assumptions alone, should inform how wind farm flow is simulated.

The poster sessions carried equal scientific weight. Javier Sanz Rodrigo, Bjarke Tobias Olsen, James Bleeg, and Antoine Mathieu presented a machine learning based enrichment of the FLOW-Alaiz Benchmark, aimed at improving the representativeness of siting quantities in complex terrain. Jakob Mann and Mikael Sjöholm presented findings on the characteristics of extreme wind ramps observed from a fleet of turbines, a topic directly relevant to grid stability and turbine loading.

Taken together, FLOW's presence at Torque 2026 spanned wake modelling and validation, atmospheric measurement, resource assessment, and wind farm flow simulation. The conference gave FLOW partners the opportunity to present their results to a demanding scientific audience, gather feedback from peers working on related challenges, and contribute to the broader research effort shaping the next generation of wind energy systems.