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New platform bundles digital solutions for planning and operating wind farms – first service GRIDSLI now available
The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems IWES has launched the “IWES Digital Hub”, a central platform for digital solutions from wind energy research. The web application has been online since mid-January and makes selected software tools from the institute available for industry and research. The aim is to visibly bundle the digital expertise of Fraunhofer IWES, facilitate access to the tools developed, validated, and tested at the institute, and thus make the planning, design, and operation of wind farms more efficient.
The IWES Digital Hub is designed for wind energy stakeholders involved in various phases of a wind farm's life cycle – from site assessment and planning to design and layout to operation, monitoring, and optimization of existing turbines and wind farms. The platform brings together a growing collection of digital solutions that are being developed and gradually expanded at Fraunhofer IWES. The underlying methods and algorithms are predominantly developed in national and international research projects and tested in real-world applications in collaboration with industry partners. This allows new scientific findings to be gradually translated into tools and made available to users as software modules. “In the future, the institute’s scientific expertise will increasingly be made available as digital services – from yield forecasts and flow simulations to selected questions regarding investment and system decisions,” explains Juliane Burfeind, Chief Digital Officer at Fraunhofer IWES.
GRIDSLI: First service on the IWES Digital Hub facilitates computational fluid dynamics in complex terrain
GRIDSLI is the first service available on the IWES Digital Hub. The tool is a terrain mesh generator that significantly simplifies and accelerates computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in OpenFOAM¹ mesh format.
GRIDSLI offers, among other things:
• Fast, precise terrain meshing: Raw data is converted into clean, simulation-ready grids in just a few minutes – without time-consuming pre-processing.
• Design for complex sites: The tool is optimized for challenging topographies such as slopes or forested valleys and delivers a robust mesh for wind farm simulations.
• Scientifically validated methods: GRIDSLI is based on many years of Fraunhofer IWES expertise and has already been tested in numerous research and industrial projects.
GRIDSLI is available to users of the IWES Digital Hub after registration and can be used directly via the platform.
Additional digital services in preparation
The IWES Digital Hub will be expanded in the upcoming months to include these already planned tools and services. Additional digital offerings from the institute will follow gradually.
• NEXUS: Decentralized management of time series data, connection to numerous data sources via plug-ins, access via REST API from Python or MATLAB, as well as integrated user and single sign-on management.
• FOXES (Farm Optimization and eXtended yield Evaluation Software) as a web application: Calculation of wake loss, annual energy production, and optimization of wind farms.
• COBRAZ (Investment Decision Support and Sizing of Energy Systems): Energy economic modeling under market and regulatory conditions, optimization of plant size and operation, and customer-specific analyses.
• LYNXES (Localized Yield and Numerical eXploration of Environment and Site): Modeling of wind currents in complex terrain with fully automated workflow.
Contributing to the energy transition through digital expertise
With the IWES Digital Hub, Fraunhofer IWES aims to systematically make internal scientific expertise available as digital services. This allows new developments from research projects to be transferred more quickly into practical applications and makes a concrete contribution to cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and risk reduction in renewable energy projects.
Visit the IWES Digital Hub: https://digitalhub.iwes.fraunhofer.de/
¹ OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM is open-source software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. It offers a comprehensive collection of physical models and numerical methods for calculating flow and transport processes in complex geometries and is used worldwide in research and industry.
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Fraunhofer IWES
The Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems IWES conducts application-oriented research for a sustainable future. The focus topics of the Fraunhofer IWES are offshore, hydrogen, test infrastructure and digitalization. The research work in these future-oriented key technologies plays a central role in the innovation process and strengthens the business location for the benefit of our society by transferring the research results to industry. More than 400 employees at nine locations are developing innovative methods to accelerate the expansion of the wind energy and hydrogen economy, minimize risks, and increase cost efficiency.
Contact partner at the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems IWES
Juliane Burfeind
Chief Digital Officer
Phone: +49 471 14290-355
Email: juliane.burfeind@iwes.fraunhofer.de
www.iwes.fraunhofer.de
https://digitalhub.iwes.fraunhofer.de/ IWES Digital Hub
The homepage of the IWES Digital Hub.
Copyright: ©Fraunhofer IWES, officesituation generated by Firefly 2026
Overview of the digital services.
Copyright: ©Fraunhofer IWES
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