Final report
Dates and location
22 April — 24 April 2026, London, UK
Chairperson
Oliver Buxton
Co-chairperson
Mike Hölling, Richard Stevens
Conference fees
- Regular registration fees: 250.00 €
- Registration fees - PhD Student: 150.00 €
What other funding was obtained?
European Research Community on FLow, Turbulence and Combustion (ERCOFTAC),
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), grant no. EP/V006436/1
What were the participants offered?
Provision of lecture theatre and break-out space, plus catering for lunch/coffee breaks at Imperial College London for the three-day duration of the event.
Drinks/canapés reception at the Royal Geographical Society - this doubled up as the colloquium poster session.
Colloquium dinner and drinks reception in the ballroom of Ognisko, a Polish club opposite Imperial College London.
Opportunity to submit work relevant to the aims of the colloquium to a special issue of FLOW (Cambridge University Press).
Two prizes (£150 and £100) for the posters adjudicated to be the winner and runner up.
Applicants (members)
- Søren Andersen
- Oliver Buxton
- Udhaya Chandiran Krishnan Paranjothi
- Nicolas Mazellier
- Ingrid Neunaber
- Marco Placidi
- Richard Stevens
Applicants (non members)
- Ali Ata Adam
- Pedro Alves
- Hossein Amini Kafiabad
- Matias Oscar Avila
- Pawel Baj
- Majid Bastankhah
- Vasco Batista
- Pierre Benard
- Lucy Bennet-Stevens
- Alessandro Bianchini
- Neelakash Biswas
- James Bleeg
- Akhileshwar Borra
- Martin Bourhis
- Joshua Brinkerhoff
- Claudia Brunner
- Leonardo Chamorro
- Philippe Chatelain
- Jiangang Chen
- Eric Climent
- Alexia Everley
- Esteban Ferrer
- Nicolai Gayle Nygaard
- Dennice Gayme
- Julia Gottschall
- Mike Graham
- Dylan Green
- Mano Grunwald
- Jason Hearst
- Emily Louise Hodgson
- Michael Hölling
- Michael Howland
- Stefan Ivanell
- Mehtab Ahmed Khan
- Hyunseok Kim
- Roman Klopsch
- Henry Korb
- Sylvain Laizet
- Stefano Leonardi
- Lorenn Le Turnier
- Luoqin Liu
- Julie Lundquist
- Adrian Mcglade
- Charles Meneveau
- Thomas Messmer
- Andrew Mole
- Wim Munters
- Francisco Oliveira
- Herbert Owen
- José Palma
- María Rosales
- Sparsh Sharma
- Jens Nørkær Sørensen
- Fotis Sotiropoulos
- Kostas Steiros
- Sebastiano Stipa
- Simone Tamaro
- Federico Taruffi
- Craig Thompson
- Sachin Umans
- Ilan Upfal
- Oguz Uzol
- Elisa Valepyn
- Jan-Willem Van Wingerden
- Dominic Von Terzi
- Xiaolei Yang
Scientific report
We were delighted to have put together a programme that included 75 participants from institutions in 18 different countries. The organisation of this colloquium was motivated by exciting recent advancements in the understanding of the complex physics governing wind- turbine and wind-farm wakes, with profound implications for the future of the wind-energy industry. This three-day event brought together leading experts from the turbulence and wind energy communities, including international scholars and industry professionals, to discuss the latest developments in the aerodynamics of turbulent wind-turbine and wind-farm wakes, both from fundamental and applied perspectives.
In particular, the submissions to the colloquium revolved around four major themes:
- New advances in the underlying physics of turbulent entrainment, in particular into both individual wind-turbine wakes and wind-farm wakes. Recent experiments and direct numerical simulations (DNS) have unveiled a particular influence of freestream turbulence on the development of wakes and jets, which are at odds with existing low-fidelity wind-turbine wake models. The colloquium provided an opportunity to review these latest advancements, discuss their implications for the wind-energy community, and explore the potential for improving current wind-turbine wake models.
- New advances in the fidelity of numerical simulations/experimental representations of wind turbines/farms. Recent high-fidelity large eddy simulations (LES) of wind-turbine and wind-farm flows have revealed new topics of interest for the wind-energy community, including phenomena such as pressure-gravity waves arising from atmospheric stratification, the penetration of aero-acoustics into the sea, and oceanic mixing due to the presence of offshore wind turbines, amongst others. In addition, recent experiments with lab-scale floating wind turbines, wind farms, and turbines exposed to faithful atmospheric turbulence using active turbulence-generating grids have yielded breakthrough results. The colloquium provided an opportunity to present the latest findings from recent experiments and simulations, as well as to discuss new approaches for accurately representing wind-turbine and wind-farm flows, both experimentally and numerically.
- New advances in our understanding of the multi-scale dynamics in wind-turbine wakes. Recent studies have highlighted the multi-scale nature of wind-turbine wakes, with dynamics originating both from the turbine itself and, in the case of floating turbines, from their wave-induced motion. These dynamics play a crucial role in the wake’s recovery. The colloquium brought together the latest insights into single turbine wakes, with a focus on wake recovery and dynamics, and explored how these insights can contribute to the development of more accurate wind-turbine and wind-farm wake models.
- New advances in understanding the interaction between atmospheric turbulence and wind-turbine and wind-farm flows. Considered by Paul Veers et al. (Grand Challenges in the Science of Wind Energy, Science 366, 2019) as one of the three major challenges in wind-energy research, a deeper understanding of wind-farm flow physics across scales is still needed, particularly regarding the interaction between atmospheric turbulence and wind-farm flows. The colloquium provided a platform to discuss recent advancements, notably in remote sensing technologies for atmospheric phenomena and full-scale in-farm wake measurements (e.g. LiDAR), as well as in LES simulations of wind-farm flows and mesoscale modelling tools.
The list of participants included 18 Ph.D. students, whose attendance was subsidised through the ERCOFTAC funding, as well as a number of postdoctoral researchers. The scientific programme included 15 poster presentations, 3 keynote talks and 43 invited talks which all took place in Lecture Theatre 201 in the Skempton Building at Imperial College London. Lengthy scientific discussions flourished throughout the three days of the colloquium during the lunch and coffee breaks and the colloquium’s social programme. This included a drinks and canapés reception in the Main Hall of the Royal Geographical Society. This event doubled up as the poster session which was held in the Society’s Education Centre. The conference dinner was held in the ballroom of Ognisko, a Polish club that was founded as a joint initiative of the British government and Polish government in exile in September 1939 that sits in a beautiful Victorian building directly opposite the main entrance of Imperial College London. The invited talks were largely given by distinguished academics in the field, but we deliberately solicited a small number of abstracts from Ph.D. students and two of the invited talks were given from amongst these submissions.
The keynote talks were selected to represent all four of the colloquium themes. The first of the keynote talks was given on the Wednesday morning by Prof. Raúl Bayoán Cal from Portland State University on his efforts to experimentally investigate the importance of entrainment into wind farms, and how this can be related to the wake recovery of both individual turbines and the farm as a whole. The talk also explored the multi-scale nature of the entrainment into farms of floating wind turbines where additional multi-scale dynamics are introduced by the wave-induced motions of the turbines. The second keynote talk was delivered on the Thursday morning by Prof. Sandrine Aubrun from Centrale Nantes. This talk included a historical evaluation of the representation of wind turbines with porous discs experimentally, which mimics the use of actuator disc models which are commonly used in LES of wind-turbine arrays. The talk finished by examining the effects of surge motion on porous discs, representative of some of the wave-induced dynamics that a floating turbine would be exposed to. The final keynote was delivered on the Friday morning by Prof. Johan Meyers who discussed several important factors relating to wind-farm blockage, namely hydrostatic blockage due to the stratification of the free atmosphere. The implications of this can lead to detrimental effects (unfavourable pressure gradient upstream of a wind farm) as well as beneficial effects (quicker farm-wake recovery due to favourable pressure gradients downstream of the farm). The talk finished by discussing the development of fast methods that enrich classical wake models with a blockage correction.
We received sponsorship from Cambridge University Press that endowed a prize for the winning poster as well as the runner up. The winner of the competition, receiving a voucher worth £150 was Sachin Umans from TU Delft with a poster entitled “An actuatable porous disk for miniature active cluster wake control wind tunnel ex- periments”. The runner, up receiving a voucher worth £100, from MIT was Ilan Upfal with his poster entitled “A new joint yaw and induction control paradigm revealed by unified rotor modeling and validation”. The colloquium finished by soliciting feedback from the participants as to whether there was an appetite to have a similar meeting in a few years’ time and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, so watch this space.
Number of participants from each country
| Country | Participants |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 20 |
| Germany | 10 |
| United States | 8 |
| Netherlands | 7 |
| Denmark | 4 |
| Spain | 4 |
| Belgium | 4 |
| France | 3 |
| China | 3 |
| Sweden | 3 |
| Portugal | 2 |
| Poland | 1 |
| Italy | 1 |
| Canada | 1 |
| Norway | 1 |
| Turkey | 1 |
| Total | 73 |