Development of a wind turbine LiDAR simulator

Abstract

Remote sensing techniques like LiDAR offer many novel applications to the wind energy community, e.g. fast and accurate measurements of inflow and wake wind fields from the turbine nacelle. The prospects of such a new technique are evaluated with a software tool simulating a nacelle-based LiDAR system. The paper presents the implementation and application of a simulator that has been conceived to support the design of wind field scanning procedures. The tool helps to optimize the hardware setup, scanning trajectories and frequency. Furthermore it can be coupled with an aeroelastic code with the aim of developing a predictive control based on remote sensing.