Boosting the Performances of Wind Turbines thanks to Microstructure Coating

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The wind energy market is developing quickly and it will produce 15% of the EU’s electricity demand by 2020, avoiding 333 million tonnes of CO2 per year and saving Europe €28 billion a year in fuel costs. Yet, it struggles to find innovations that can reach the market soon, with little costs, and that be used on existing turbines. We address this need via a novel coating technology that we have developed in house and patented. In short, we create microstructures on the wind turbine blades in order to reduce their air resistance. These microstructures are grooves that channel the air turbulence on the surface thus improving the aerodynamics. Our innovation is perfectly suited to wind turbines blades, since it helps to increase their efficiency without changing their shapes or manufacturing process, and it can be even used on existing wind turbines, simply by recoating them. We are currently at TRL 6, we filed one patent in 2018 and performed an extensive Freedom to Operate analysis, with positive results. Our customers are the manufacturers of wind turbines, who want to create a better product without re-engineering the blades, and the Operations and Maintenance companies of wind farms, who want to improve the performances of existing wind turbines. The Total Addressable Market is over €1.76 billion. Our first sale will happen in December 2020 but we are already commercializing the printing system without the full capabilities of microstructure coating in order to gain revenues and reputation. In our commercial strategy, we will first address five countries that are promising (UK, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands) because of the maturity of the wind turbine market to then expand to the rest of the EU, and eventually to the whole world. According to our forecasts, our turnover will reach €16 million at the end of 2022. We are a woman-led team of 9 people, all with at least a master degree, with complementary expertise in engineering and business.