How Can Component Technology Support the Wind Industry?
Shawn Meng • *This is a blog-friendly version of the paper our team submitted for the WindEurope 2025 Conference.
Summary
Software developers of applications in the wind industry face many challenges, each further exacerbated by challenging headwinds in both the political climate and the inherently difficult prospect of clean energy generation. Similarly, those creating applications intended to serve the wind industry face unique roadblocks. These range from complex data interoperability and visualization demands to limited development resources and a dispersed, international community.
Tech Soft 3D wants to share our perspective on some of these challenges, the potential opportunities for those developing software in this space, and how licensing external toolkits helps organizations cost-effectively provide more complete applications to the wind industry. We will outline how these toolkits can be transformative for development teams, showcase a few that are most applicable for the wind industry, and share how Tech Soft 3D is poised to support the wind industry.
Finally, Tech Soft 3D wants to express how our commitment to working in this space goes beyond the value our toolkits can provide and the partnership we create. We believe in supporting the moral, global imperative that is the promotion of cleaner energy generation.
HOW CAN COMPONENT TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT THE WIND INDUSTRY?
WHAT APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES DOES THE WIND INDUSTRY FACE?
The wind industry faces all the challenges of software development – expensive labor costs, long to-market times, maintenance costs, data management and security, and much more. Beyond these universal troubles, developers face some issues worsened by the nature of the industry itself. These are some of the core problems that go beyond the typical developer experience.
CAD AND CAE DATA INTEROPERABILITY
Perhaps no one attending Wind Europe is under the delusion that wind energy is simple. The scale and complexity of the engineering and resultant data of turbines can be staggering. This event also represents another fundamental strength and challenge in the wind industry: this is a global, cross-collaborative market, with hundreds of people touching processes from start to finish. These factors combine to present unique demands for CAD data translation, and toolkits enable developers to meet these needs head-on. Developers in this market must provide support for a wide range of CAD formats and offer seamless transfer of data without information loss. The size of files in this industry demands unmatched speed and precision.
THE NEED FOR POWERFUL VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES
The nature of the wind industry presents strong demands for 3D visualization, often with unique challenges. Visualization tools offer the opportunity to interact with these models more directly, across the design, planning and deployment of wind energy projects. When done well, good visualization can empower better collaboration, with collaboration across job titles, organizations, regulatory groups, and even political borders.
For software developers, the challenges of providing these capabilities stem from the same fundamentals of the wind industry itself – namely, the mechanically complex, massive assemblies that may need to be rendered in their entirety, along with operational, maintenance and additional metadata.This requires carefully balancing model fidelity and performance. Such models must be interactive, require animation, and must be user-friendly to a diverse group of people, all with different levels of engineering/software expertise. Some applications must work in challenging remote environments, such as offshore wind sites. They may require version control, multi-user access, and integrate with real-time monitoring and maintenance systems. Finally, the software they develop last the life of the turbines, which is often measured in decades.
Tech Soft 3D’s Consulting Engineer Shawn Meng will be presenting at Wind Europe 2025, showcasing a tool that highlights the strong visualization and post-processing demands of the wind industry. The HoopsFast desktop application supports visualization for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. Users can edit and save OpenFAST input files directly in the application. This tool also allows for analysis to be seamlessly run in the application, with basic post-processing capabilities built in. From here, models can be exported for web visualization on the free HOOPS Web Platform Demo. Further HOOPS tools are available for more rendering options, including achieving photo-realism.
HoopsFast was developed using HOOPS toolkits and serves as tangible proof of the utility Tech Soft 3D toolkits can provide the wind industry, which will be further explored later.
THE UNIQUE POTENTIAL DIGITAL TWINS IN THE WIND ENERGY INDUSTRY
Wind turbines represent a significant investment in both production and maintenance. Their nature requires complex integrated systems to be exposed to the elements for years at a time, often in numbers or areas where physical inspection is difficult and/or expensive. Reliable digital twins represent a way for the wind industry to address these challenges in a cost-effective, smart manner.
Digital twins offer unparalleled lifecycle management, with real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, enhanced simulation and design, and more, all empower organizations with better decision-making. For the wind industry specifically, these areas are particularly crucial. As wind farms can scale to hundreds of units, digital twins offer a centralized, scalable way to monitor, compare, and scale their usage.
Crucially, this is an area where technology is constantly improving – digital twins can be paired with machine learning and AI systems to improve prediction accuracy and potentially lay the groundwork for more automated control systems.
Of course, digital twins require powerful visualization and simulation capabilities, along with better handling of data, from real-time feedback to CAD and CAE information.
While digital twins offer engineers and wind industry organizations massive benefits, they present significant challenges to software developers. These powerful capabilities require highly specialized development resources to integrate successfully, representing a barrier to taking advantage of this powerful technology.
SUPPORTING THE ENERGY TRANSITION DESPITE CHALLENGING CONDITIONS
Around the world, political shifts and external lobbying create pressure on the wind industry, limiting resources and putting more strain on an already demanding field. Energy generation is the fundamental industry of our modern world, with powerful entrenched interests and ever-shifting political ramifications. For software developers in the wind industry, this means navigating the usual challenges and resource constraints found in other sectors—only amplified by the unique complexities of the field.
As a result, it is more important than ever that developers provide as complete a product as possible, while remaining cost-conscious. While developers in every market want to finish their applications as soon as possible, the very nature of green energy puts added pressure on these timelines.
HOW TECH SOFT AND TOOLKITS CAN SUPPORT WIND ENERGY
Supporting developments in green energy is more than a market opportunity for us or a good fit for our toolkits – it is the right thing to do. By doing everything we can to support the wind industry, we can contribute our unique skillset to the essential challenge of energy transition, diversification, and overall climate action.
The generation of wind energy is a material sign of the energy transition, a physical representation of the world trying something different, something more sustainable. They represent our collective effort in a future we can build toward. We are thrilled to be working to support software developers in this industry, however we can, and be an active part of these necessary innovations.
Shawn Meng, Consulting Engineer, Tech Soft 3D
A core part of our efforts in renewable energy includes supporting our team’s passion projects in these spaces. Tech Soft 3D’s Shawn Meng’s work on the preprocessing and visualization tool for OpenFAST files will promote the usage of this technology for real-world applications, supporting collaboration and research in this crucial area.
The demand for wind and other forms of cleaner energy will not go away. Energy generation is the fundamental industry of our world, and its demands grow and evolve every day. New technologies like artificial intelligence, while transformative, only stretch our energy needs further. At Tech Soft 3D, we want to make a conscious, active choice to support software development in the areas that make a difference in addressing the climate crisis and energy revolution.
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WHY USE COMPONENT TECHNOLOGY AT ALL?
Whether it be in the wind industry or any other field, developers and decision-makers are faced with the challenge of building a product that meets their extensive demands while achieving the standout goal that makes them different from the competition. While the use cases change with the industry, all developers want to minimize cost, produce their application quickly, and provide the most complete end product possible.
A natural follow-up question is: Why don’t we just develop all these application features ourselves? The answer is simple – much like in energy generation, resources are limited, and developing software is hard, expensive, and very time-consuming. Areas like data translation, 3D visualization, and simulation are highly specialized, taking a team of highly paid developers with decades of cumulative experience months or years to create.
Even then, the result lacks the decades of refinement and market experience offered by toolkit vendors like Tech Soft 3D. Your organization needs to pay to maintain every single one of these features, occupying resources you would much rather spend on your core ideas.
Toolkits offer a way around this by outsourcing the areas where you need functionality, but not necessarily to reinvent the wheel. You can leverage someone else’s effort, adding polished, pre-made capabilities to your product faster and at a fraction of the cost.
Component technology is a foundation from which skilled, creative developer teams can create an endless array of products. Strong teams consistently use the same component technology to create different products for diverse, unrelated markets. Simply put, if your idea is strong and your team capable, component technology is a springboard to help focus on what makes you special.
SUPPORT FOR DEVELOPERS, BY DEVELOPERS
As mentioned, one of the key benefits of licensing toolkits is the years of refinement by a team of experts they go through. Tech Soft 3D has been providing toolkits and supporting developers for over 25 years. By licensing from Tech Soft 3D, this experience is made available to you and your development team in a hands-on, direct manner.
One of Tech Soft 3D’s most fundamental priorities is the creation of Strategic Technology Partnerships. When we work with an organization, we do far more than send them some code and wish them luck we look to play an active role in supporting their development experience. Our entire team, from developers and consulting engineers to the way we handle sales, exist to support one goal – helping you build better software, faster.
WHICH TECH SOFT 3D TOOLKITS ARE MOST USEFUL TO THE WIND INDUSTRY?
There are a wide range of toolkits available to developers in the wind industry, both vendor-supported and open-source. Tech Soft 3D toolkits offer premium, industry-leading capabilities from a team with decades of experience. Here are the toolkits we believe are most relevant to those developing tools for the wind industry.
DATA ACCESS
HOOPS Exchange is Tech Soft 3D’s CAD data access toolkit, offering import support for 30+ popular formats. The toolkit supports rapid, fail-free read support for CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, Revit, Creo, NX, Solid Edge, and many others. Crucially, this toolkit is capable of quickly translating the large files common in wind energy while preserving more of the information present in the CAD data. This includes PMI, simulation information, and more.
For CAE data, CEETRON Access supports over 20 industry-standard CAE formats, including Nastran, Abaqus, Ansys, LS-Dyna, Fluent, openFOAM, Ensight, and many more.
These toolkits can provide wind energy developers with the flexibility they need to support their applications. They can better empower the types of interdisciplinary and international cooperation the industry demands, across the entirety of the design process.
VISUALIZATION HOOPS
HOOPS Visualize is an engineering-focused native 3D visualization toolkit for Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, and Android, designed to help developers quickly and conveniently add its capabilities to their applications. The C++ and C# interface backed by OpenGL and DirectX drivers provides unmatched functionality for engineering applications.
HOOPS Communicator, much like HOOPS Visualize, provides powerful visualization capabilities but is specifically designed for web applications. Developers can use this toolkit to provide support for massive models, navigation of complex assemblies, intelligent streaming, and server-side rendering directly in their customers’ web browsers. The JavaScript API is an industry leader at providing 2D and 3D CAD viewing and interactive capabilities to developers creating new web-based applications.
HOOPS Communicator is highly customizable, with developers able to tailor both the look and functionality of the toolkit to their needs. You can see examples of HOOPS Communicator in real-world products here in Tech Soft 3D’s “How HOOPS Communicator Can Be Customized for Your Needs”.
For a more complete breakdown on how these visualization toolkits compare, check out “CEETRON Envision vs. HOOPS Communicator & HOOPS Visualize: Which is Right for You?”
As mentioned, digital twins are especially useful for the wind industry, and the powerful visualization capabilities provided by these toolkits can serve as the foundation for developers working in this space. These toolkits are supported with powerful integration with their data translation counterparts, offering a seamless experience for developers leveraging both in their applications.