Windpuls: Data made up out of thin air

Thanks to professional wind measurement of unprecedented quality, Christoph Feichtinger and Philipp Kitzmüller are transforming the wind from a disruptive factor into a predictable influencing factor for athletes, developers and the energy industry.

The wind brings the weather, moves the seas, the clouds and the air and everything that grows on land. It drives boats, mills and power stations. Breaks, destroys and devastates. And it has fascinated mankind for as long as it has existed. Indigenous peoples regard it as the breath of the world, and even in our latitudes the wind symbolizes the incessant change that lies in the fleeting nature of all existence. For decades, the notorious unpredictability of the wind has also kept engineers, designers and scientists from a wide range of disciplines on their toes. On the other hand, it has also kept ambitious athletes on their toes, who have to watch more or less helplessly as the wind distorts their performance in the saddle of a racing bike, on the running track or in ski jumping. Surprisingly, however, the immense importance of wind in the most diverse dimensions is by no means reflected in correspondingly sophisticated measurement technology.

Trumpeting buddies
"By default, wind is measured at a height of ten meters, but rarely at the point that really matters," says Christoph Feichtinger, who has decided to change exactly that. With a sensor and the start-up Windpuls, which he founded with his buddy Philipp Kitzmüller and their two partners Elke Anzenbacher and Maria Dieplinger in Linz on May 4, 2021. Under conditions that are quite unusual even in the colorful world of start-ups: Coming from Schildorn and Pramet in the Innviertel region, Kitzmüller and Feichtinger have been close friends since they met in trumpet lessons when they were ten years old. That was almost 30 years ago.

The winner of the eco-caratahon
They never lost sight of each other, even though they kept going their separate ways: Feichtinger went to Graz, where he studied mechanical engineering and became an industrial engineer with a focus on energy and environmental technology. While still a student, he helped build Austria's most energy-efficient hydrogen-powered vehicle at the time. It won the Shell Eco Marathon 2010 by achieving a mileage of 1,700 km from the equivalent of 1 liter of petrol. Feichtinger then worked for five years as a project manager at AVL qpunkt in Graz. Among other things, he worked on cooling simulations and cooling circuit developments for customers such as Porsche and Audi before moving to KTM for another five years. There, he built up the aerodynamics department for road racing before finally becoming Technical Director of the Digitrans innovation laboratory in Linz in 2019, which works on automated and autonomous mobility.

A Corporate Life
Meanwhile, his friend Philipp Kitzmüller made a career in corporate life: after studying business informatics at Kepler University, he became an account manager in the insurance business at Raiffeisen, which he left in 2013 for a job as Risk & Insurance Manager at Lenzing AG. After a one-and-a-half-year interlude as Key Account and Sales Manager at the Austrian branch of the US Marsh Group, he returned to Risk Management at Lenzing in 2015 and moved within the Group in 2019, where he has been responsible for global indirect purchasing ever since. He did not fail to notice that his best friend had been working almost fanatically over the years to turn the unpredictable disruptive factor of wind into a measurable and therefore usable influencing factor for mobility and racing.

Defiance as the driving force
As Feichtinger freely admits, the driving force behind the development of mobile wind measurement technology was often pure anger in the engineer's belly: at the fact that all computer simulations and tests in the wind tunnel proved to be unusable on the open road. And about the fact that his superiors more than once opted for a suboptimal component variant. Based on random performance data, Feichtinger knew that the wind had had a secret but decisive hand in the test runs on the test track. However, this could not be proven due to a lack of reliable wind data.

Data from all directions
This gave the engineer with a solid knowledge of aerodynamics, which is considered black magic by those outside the field, no peace of mind. And so he developed a sensor unlike any other to date: The wind pulse sensor designed by Feichtinger not only measures the absolute and relative wind with wind pressure and wind direction, but also the temperature, air pressure and the current position of the measuring point, including any vibrations. In other words, if a racing cyclist leans into a bend or a sailing boat with wind pulse sensors on board leans, the measuring device reacts in real time.

Patent granted
Although the invention has already been granted an Austrian patent, Feichtinger is by no means satisfied: The next step is to get the sensor ready for series production and to finalize the interface so that the 3D wind data can also be played out live on smartphones, tablets or other end devices. In addition, it is important to achieve the longest possible durability, to cope with dirt and icing and to get a grip on calibration. Some basic certifications - for example for the CE mark - are also still outstanding. As is the approval of the European patent, which has long since been applied for.

Perfectionism versus pragmatism
"No matter what happens, Christoph will never be completely satisfied," smiles Kitzmüller about his partner's perfectionism, which he balances out with pragmatism. "Christoph has worked with various technicians, all of whom quickly left when it came to concrete entrepreneurial responsibility," says the sales professional, who had long been tempted by the idea of founding a start-up after many years of working in corporate structures.
Since the best friends decided to go through with it together at the beginning of 2021, things have been moving forward at Windpuls at an almost stormy pace.

Big steps, big plans
After being founded in May, the start-up immediately found a place in tech2b's scale-up incubation program and a renowned Austrian hardware partner to take on part of the entrepreneurial risk. A cooperation request to the Hagenberg University of Applied Sciences provided the start-up with its first employee, interface programmer René Hörschinger. Over the next five years, the company is set to grow into a 30-40-strong team of hardware and software developers, data scientists, marketing and sales people as well as key account managers for the individual sectors in which the Windpuls sensor technology can be used profitably. Co-founders Elke Anzenbacher, a communications and marketing specialist, and Maria Dieplinger, an HR specialist, play a key role in this.

Now it's time to be quick
As far as Feichtinger and Kitzmüller know, there is nothing on the market anywhere in the world that even comes close to their sensor. So far, professional wind measurement has only been available on racing sailboats, where a measurement technician has to be assigned to evaluate endlessly long measurement chains with the help of cabinet-sized hardware. To date, wind measurement has only been available to specialists, is not very reliable and is far removed from the 3D data from Windpuls in terms of information content. The great technical advantage of the Windpuls sensor technology allows Feichtinger and Kitzmüller to maintain their rapid pace of development. Their greatest concern is that a competitor could position itself on the market with a qualitatively inferior product based on technology outside the Windpuls patent before Windpuls makes its debut.

A tempting number of possibilities
The fact that there are so many different areas of application - sailing, cycling and skiing, energy generation from wind power, smart building technology and mobility - initially presented Windpuls with a focusing problem. "The deeper you delve into the subject matter, the more practical fields you discover," Christoph Feichtinger has found. This was also the experience of a group of students at the Kepler University in Linz, who are developing a business model for Windpuls as part of a lecture project. As Philipp Kitzmüller explains, they had a similar experience: "At first, they found the subject matter brittle, but as they continued to work on it, they discovered more and more facets and possibilities."

It all starts at the wheel
Although the founders are also repeatedly faced with the dilemma of whether their business purpose should lie more in the sale of wind information or in aerodynamic optimization, Windpuls - and this is another characteristic of the young company - is almost uncannily focused and pragmatic: the first Windpuls market will be cycling, which is practised by 4.3 million enthusiasts in Germany alone. "A realistic market share of one percent means sales of 430,000 wind sensors in this market segment," calculates Kitzmüller. "And we're not even talking about the rest of Europe and the world."

Mentor and triathlete
With the help of Windpuls, cyclists can constantly adapt their riding position to the wind. During races, they can choose the best aerodynamic position in the field - and gain up to three minutes over a distance of 30 kilometers, as Feichtinger has calculated. Windpuls is already working closely with a professional cycling team. The start-up has also received valuable feedback from its tech2b mentor Martin Behrens: He not only contributed his experience as the founder of Presono, but also as an enthusiastic triathlete.

Take-off in Ramsau
In December 2021, the first practical test will take place in Ramsau am Dachstein for women's ski jumping and Nordic combined in collaboration with the FIS. "With our technology, we can provide an all-round picture of the wind conditions and the influence of the wind on the athlete from the approach to the take-off to the landing," promises Christoph Feichtinger. Windpuls has another test partner in an Austrian Olympic participant in the sailing discipline.

Future market for wind power plants
The Windpuls team also sees great potential in cable cars, lifts and, above all, wind power plants: Here, the wind is currently measured at the tower instead of directly at the rotor blades - which would improve the control of the wind power plants so much that each one could run for three to five years longer.
Windpuls is refraining from entering this market for the time being. This is because it is difficult: it takes around ten years for newcomers to be able to place an innovation there. Kitzmüller and Feichtinger don't want to wait that long: the first pilot customer projects are planned for mid-2022, and things should really get going in 2023.

"The GoPro of wind measurement"
The office is another expression of the realistic spirit of Windpuls. The landlord is Feichtinger's employer Digitrans, which is just as aware of its employee's plans as Lenzing AG is of Kitzmüller's entrepreneurial activities. Sharing the resources of others instead of building up a huge overhead themselves is generally the strategy of the two founders: they are also considering outsourcing not only production but also e-commerce and logistics to a specialized partner. "Our strength as founders lies in the fact that, thanks to our professional experience, we know very well what we can do ourselves and what we prefer to leave to others who are better at something than we are," thinks Kitzmüller. When it comes to formulating their entrepreneurial vision, the Windpuls founders certainly don't need any external support. Because it is catchy and concise: "Windpuls will be the GoPro of wind measurement."