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With TORQUE 2026 in Bruges now behind us, it is a good moment to take stock of the scientific contribution SUDOCO brought to one of the most relevant gatherings for the international wind energy research community. The project arrives at this milestone with a body of sixteen papers, a sign of the maturity reached in tackling — from complementary angles — the challenge of co-designing control, layout and operational strategies for offshore wind farms.
The papers move along a number of recurring thematic threads, which we try to bring together here.
Wake-mixing and wake-steering: the helix under scrutiny. Several papers dig into the helix technique, which forces the turbine wake into a helical structure to accelerate its recovery. Van der Hoek and colleagues (link) assess its impact on farm-scale fatigue loads, finding a potential increase in annual energy production of up to 1.1%, alongside higher loading on pitch bearings. Dammann and colleagues address the robustness of the technique under realistic turbulence regimes (link), showing that net gains persist even under high ambient turbulence, albeit with reduced effectiveness. On the experimental side, Chondromatidis and colleagues (link) confirm in wind-tunnel testing that inflow turbulence intensity significantly modulates helix effectiveness, while Bortolin and colleagues (link) experimentally compare helix and wake-steering, showing that an optimally implemented wake-steering strategy outperforms wake mixing in terms of power production. Baricchio and colleagues round this thread off with an analytical method — geometric wind farm control — to rapidly approximate optimal yaw and helix setpoints, making co-design problems computationally tractable (link).
Load surrogate models. A second line of work concerns the development of data-driven surrogates for fatigue load prediction. Ramaswamy and colleagues compare different local inflow parameterizations (from rotor-averaged representations to convolutional neural networks), also introducing the new wind-farm-loads Python package (link). Shah and colleagues extend the approach to low-frequency fatigue cycles, often neglected by conventional surrogates despite being responsible for some of the most damaging loads (link). Dirik and colleagues instead propose a Graph Neural Network surrogate capable of estimating control setpoints independently of farm layout, delivering 98% of the wake-steering benefits compared to direct optimization (link).
Integrated assessment of structural health and farm economics. Pettas and colleagues present a modular, open-source framework for evaluating fatigue accumulation and farm "health" under different operational strategies (link). Gräfe and colleagues develop WINPACT, linking turbine structural response to techno-economic valuation, demonstrated on the real-world Hollandse Kust Noord case study with revenue-driven shutdown strategies (link). On a complementary front, Bechmann and colleagues investigate the optimal cut-out speed as a function of the O&M cost-revenue balance, showing how volatile markets can justify lower cut-out speeds (link), while Dammann and colleagues propose a dispatch logic for control strategies based on the marginal cost of fatigue damage, responding to day-ahead price volatility (link).
Layout, co-design and inter-farm interactions. Kainz and colleagues systematically compare layout design, control, and co-design in mitigating both internal and external wakes, using the IEA Wind 2200-22-MW reference cluster, and expose the limits of control alone when neighbouring farms are large (link). Baricchio and colleagues introduce an original metric — the layout field error — to quantitatively compare different layouts with equal performance, revealing how AEP- and NPV-driven optimizations produce systematically different configurations (link).
High-fidelity simulations and numerical tools. Spyropoulos and colleagues present a novel "Generation Zone" approach for cost-effective Actuator Line aeroelastic simulations, applied to a three-turbine IEA 15 MW cluster to study rotor-wake interaction (link). Lokken and colleagues close the picture with a synchronous multi-objective framework based on desirability functions, bringing energy yield maximisation and structural load containment together within a single decision-making framework (link).
Taken together, SUDOCO's scientific output presented at TORQUE 2026 reflects a consortium able to cover the full value chain of wind farm control co-design: from the underlying physics of wake-mixing techniques, through surrogate load modelling, to their translation into concrete operational and economic decisions. It is precisely this ability to hold engineering rigour and market relevance together that may well be this conference edition's most lasting legacy.
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