Improving the efficiency of wind and tidal energy converters is crucial in order to make these technologies competitive compared to traditional energy systems.

In particular, while it is important to improve their performance over a wide range of flow speeds, it is known that foils designed for high speed show poor performance at low speed.

The present research aims at investigating the underlying mechanisms of a particular flow feature observed on insect wings and bird wings, namely the leading edge vortex, and to investigate how this feature can be used to improve the efficiency of renewable energy converters at low speed conditions.