Post by Bert Conings

Yesterday’s BLEEPID workshop on leading edge erosion in offshore wind at Sirris in Leuven was a real success! 🌬️ (https://lnkd.in/e4ihNAb3) A sincere thank you to our external speakers, Nicolas Quiévy, Jean-Louis Weemaes, Marc Foldager and Peter Eecen for their excellent contributions, expertise, and valuable input during the panel discussion. You helped connect research results with real industrial challenges. Many thanks to the project partners as well (Jonathan Sterckx, Jean Carlos Poletto, Vinayak Ramachandran Nambiar, Alireza Shadmani, and Dieter Fauconnier (BLEEPID project coordinator)) for their clear presentations and impressive results, Pieter Jan Jordaens for moderating the panel discussion, and Sue Taelman and Dieter Fauconnier for helping me organize the event and making links to existing and future initiatives. And of course, thank you to the diverse audience for attending, asking sharp questions and actively engaging in the discussions 🙌. The workshop brought together a wide range of perspectives. A few examples: 🛡️ Leading edge protection systems can be highly robust, even under demanding impact conditions (even hail!). 📍 Nevertheless, leading edge erosion is strongly site-specific and can still surprise the most seasoned expert, making generic assumptions risky. 🌧️ Short, severe weather events can contribute disproportionately to lifetime erosion damage. 🌪️ Erosion is not limited to the affected blade itself; its aerodynamic impact can propagate through the wake and influence turbines further downstream. 💡 Erosion-safe curtailment only becomes attractive when operators can trust the rain signal; highly local precipitation data is therefore key to avoiding unnecessary production losses. The event made clear that, although effective solutions already exist, further R&D remains highly valuable to better understand, predict and mitigate leading edge erosion in real offshore and onshore conditions. It also highlighted concrete starting points for new collaborations at the interface of materials, sensing, modelling, maintenance and wind farm operations. If you would like to follow up on any of the topics discussed yesterday (or on wind energy innovation more broadly) please feel free to reach out. Sirris | Innovation forward OWI-Lab Ghent University Laborelec #offshorewind #innovation