Reducing development costs by up to 83 percent using virtual prototypes while accelerating design iterations

Developing sustainable and efficient renewable energy technologies

As the demand for clean, renewable energy continues to rise, wind turbine manufacturers, especially for small turbines, face increasing pressure to improve efficiency, performance and cost-effectiveness as high installation processes are a key barrier to market growth. Adding to this cost are traditional research and development (R&D) methods, which rely heavily on physical prototyping and field testing. These R&D methods are also time-consuming, slow down innovation cycles and increase development risk.

Aiming to overcome these limitations, Eunice Wind, a subsidiary of Eunice Group, is a renewable energy technology company specializing in developing and manufacturing products. Their portfolio includes hybrid power systems, wind turbines, smart electric vehicle (EV) and marine charging infrastructure and internet of things (IoT) devices. The company uses sophisticated design methods to achieve complete quality control and traceability for their materials.

One technology Eunice Wind creates is its EW16 Thetis wind turbine, which is a 50-kilowatt (kW) small wind turbine that has a type certificate issued by the TÜV Rheinland as well as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) The turbine is designed, certified and manufactured in Greece by Eunice Wind. The turbine is produced at the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility and has been successfully installed across a wide range of environments, supporting both on-grid and off-grid applications with proven reliability and performance.

To aid in designing and manufacturing this turbine, Eunice Wind partnered with FEAC Engineering, a Siemens Digital Industries Software expert partner on high-fidelity multiphysics simulations, which used Simcenter™ STAR-CCM+™ software. Simcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

FEAC Engineering is a leading provider of simulation-driven engineering solutions, specializing in high-fidelity finite element and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. With expertise in advanced modeling, they aimed to help Eunice Wind accelerate innovation, optimize performance and validate complex designs.

Shifting from physical to virtual prototyping

Relying on physical testing led to slow and costly design iteration cycles, with each prototype taking weeks or months to build, test and analyze. Due to the increased timeline associated with physical validation, it also delayed revenue and hindered market entry.

As part of their growth strategy and to overcome these limitations, Eunice Wind set out to create a precise digital twin of their EW16 Thetis turbine, aiming to optimize blade settings to enhance aerodynamic performance and energy yield while reducing maintenance intervals. However, achieving this level of fidelity required advanced numerical modeling, including fine mesh discretization and high-resolution transient CFD simulations. These simulations would place significant demands on computational resources beyond Eunice Wind’s existing capabilities.

This led Eunice Wind to partner with FEAC Engineering to help enable virtual testing of design iterations under realistic terrain and wind conditions, replacing costly physical experiments and prototypes with predictive modeling. By switching to a virtual or digital twin methodology, the company could support preventive maintenance planning, improve the structural integrity of its products and minimize their environmental footprint by reducing reliance on material-heavy testing. Additionally, by shifting to virtual testing, Eunice Wind could reduce engineering risk, excessive material use and overall product cost.

Modeling complex aerodynamic behavior

Via its partnership with FEAC Engineering, Eunice Wind used Simcenter STAR-CCM+ as its core CFD simulation environment for modeling the wind turbine’s complex aerodynamic behavior across a wide range of operating conditions. Leveraging Simcenter provided the flexibility and depth the company required to build a validated digital twin framework that included automated and repeatable workflows.

These workflows allowed for efficient analysis of design variations, site-specific performance and predictive maintenance scenarios. With Simcenter STAR-CCM+, the company could perform high-performance computing (HPC)-enabled, high-fidelity analysis using detached eddy simulation (DES), unstructured meshing and transient wake flow modeling.

Additionally, using Siemens solutions offered not only immediate technical advantages, but also a strategic, long-term opportunity to integrate computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE) and product lifecycle management (PLM) within a unified digital environment. This benefit aligns with Eunice Wind’s current and future digitalization goals.

Leveraging Simcenter STAR-CCM+, Eunice Wind’s and FEAC’s engineering teams were able to support iterative design, simulation automation and result verification at scale via the FF4EuroHPC infrastructure. FF4EuroHPC is an initiative that provides the immense computation power companies require to run high-fidelity simulations efficiently.

“With Siemens tools and FF4EuroHPC support, we’ve validated a simulation-driven workflow that accelerates innovation while reducing environmental impact,” says Sotiris Kokkinos, chief-executive officer (CEO) at FEAC Engineering.

The company found Simcenter STAR-CCM+ beneficial for rotating machinery and renewable energy applications since it could support moving meshes and turbulence models as well as integrate with optimization and automation tools and scale across HPC cores. Additionally, thanks to FEAC Engineering’s familiarity and advanced licensing with Simcenter STAR-CCM+, the consortium could tackle complex simulation with engineering grade robustness and repeatability.

Creating a more efficient, competitive and sustainable wind turbine

Using Simcenter STAR-CCM+, FEAC Engineering enhanced Eunice Wind’s design and engineering go-to-market process for the EW16 Thetis wind turbine. With the high-fidelity CFD simulations and HPC resources, they were also able to shift from traditional prototyping to a simulation-driven approach, optimizing blade pitch, rotor aerodynamics and terrain-influenced wind behavior.

Thanks to these advanced simulation capabilities, Eunice Wind reduced iteration time, which was limited in the number of iterations (typically one or two), with each cycle taking several months to fabricate, transport, test and analyze, to five to seven days. This caused development costs to reduce by up to 83 percent when compared to physical testing. Additionally, the CFD outputs informed the company’s mechanical and structural decisions, helping align performance with manufacturability and improving durability by predicting material fatigue and optimizing load paths. By validating the turbine’s performance across realistic conditions virtually, they could leverage the Simcenter solutions to enable faster certification readiness and reduce time-to-market.

“Switching to Simcenter and cutting R&D costs by over 80 percent gave us the margin room to compete more aggressively in export markets,” says Vasilis Papatsiros, CEO at Eunice Wind.

With Simcenter STAR-CCM+, FEAC Engineering helped Eunice Wind identify optimal pitch angles for the turbine’s blades, improving its energy yield by 1.5 percent, which is a significant gain in wind energy applications. additionally, due to virtual material trials, they reduced the blade’s weight by 8 percent, which directly contributes to improving the turbine’s performance and sustainability. Further, by implementing automation within Simcenter STAR-CCM+ to streamline postprocessing tasks and generate reports, the company reduced the total reporting time by up to 70 percent.

Overall, by leveraging Siemens solutions, the digital twin and FEAC Engineering’s expertise, Eunice Wind improved their design accuracy, reduced development costs and launched more efficient, competitive and sustainable wind turbine solutions while boosting investor confidence. “Using the digital twin via Simcenter STAR-CCM+ not only reduced our costs, but it also became a powerful sales tool to demonstrate real-world performance to customers and partners,” says Papatsiros.

Expanding to new development initiatives

Looking ahead, Eunice Wind plans to increase their use of Siemens solutions to further enhance product development, operational efficiency and innovation. Their next step is to expand CFD and digital twin capabilities into new development initiatives, including redesigning powertrain and power electronics systems. This will allow for more advanced multiphysics simulations and system-level performance optimization.

Additionally, the company intends to integrate real-time Simcenter SCADAS™ hardware into the digital twin environment, enabling live model validation, predictive maintenance and continual performance tuning based on real-world operating conditions. By building on their success with Simcenter STAR-CCM+ and leveraging Siemens’ broader portfolio, Eunice Wind is positioning itself at the forefront of digitally enabled, sustainable energy innovation.

“Leveraging Simcenter STAR-CCM+, partnering with FEAC and using HPC simulation gave us the agility of a large OEM with the speed of a startup,” says Papatsiros.