Towers, P. and Jones, B. (2015) Real-time wind-field reconstruction from LiDAR measurements using a dynamic wind model and state estimation. Wind Energy. ISSN 1095-4244
Abstract
The use of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) instruments offers many potential benefits to the wind energy industry. Although much effort has been invested in developing such instruments, the fact remains that they provide limited spatio-temporal velocity measurements of the wind-field. Moreover, LiDAR measurements only provide the radial (line-of-sight) velocity component of the wind, making it difficult to precisely determine wind magnitude and direction, owing to the so-called `cyclops' dilemma. Motivated by a desire to extract more information from typical LiDAR data, this paper aims to show that it is possible to accurately estimate, in a real-time fashion, the radial and tangential velocity components of the wind field. We show how such reconstructions can be generated through the synthesis of an Unscented Kalman Filter that employs a low-order dynamic model of the wind to estimate the unmeasured velocities within the wind-field, using repeated measurement updates from typical nacelle-mounted LiDAR instruments. This approach is validated upon synthetic data generated from Large Eddy Simulations (LES) of the atmospheric boundary layer. The accuracy of the wind-field estimates are validated across a variety of beam configurations, look directions, atmospheric stabilities and imperfect measurement conditions. The main outcome of this paper is a technique that offers the potential to accurately reconstruct wind-fields from LiDAR data, overcoming the cyclops dilemma in the process. The ultimate aim of this research is to provide reliable gust detection warning systems to offshore construction workers, in addition to accurate wind-field estimates for use in preview turbine pitch control systems.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2014 The Authors. Wind Energy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | LiDAR; fluid dynamics; gust detection; Cyclops dilemma; real-time estimation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 05 Oct 2015 14:52 |
Last Modified: | 05 Oct 2015 14:52 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/we.1824 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/we.1824 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:81421 |