In partnership with General Electric , and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office , researchers at— of a 2.8-megawatt GE wind turbine in Lubbock, Texas. The spinner lidar, which uses a rotating laser to provide highly accurate wind speed data, was deployed as part of the
“This project seeks to collect data to improve and validate existing and emerging wind turbine models,” said Chris Kelley, a principal investigator for the RAAW experiment at Sandia. The spinner lidar measures both the wind speed and turbulence, winds that fatigue and degrade turbine blades, approaching the wind turbine. These measurements occur across the entire rotor swept area — the circle swept by the rotating blades — every 2 seconds. This provides more data than a meteorological tower, ultimately enhancing future wind energy models.
“These measurements reveal how the wind differs across the footprint of the wind turbine rotor, which spans more than 400 feet,” saidresearcher Paula Doubrawa. “If one of the blades happens to bend more than the other two, for example, we can look into wind interactions during that time to understand what happened. We can then put these detailed wind data into our computer simulations and verify that the simulated blade responds the same way as the real one.