Lower Order Description and Reconstruction of Sparse Scanning Lidar Measurements of Wind Turbine Inflow Using Proper Orthogonal Decomposition

Preview measurements of the inflow by turbine-mounted lidar systems can be used to optimise wind turbine performance or alleviate structural loads. However, nacelle-mounted lidars suffer data losses due to unfavourable environmental conditions and laser beam obstruction by the rotating blades. Here,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Anantha Padmanabhan Kidambi Sekar, Marijn Floris van Dooren, Andreas Rott, Martin Kühn
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-06-01
Series:Remote Sensing
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/11/2681
Description
Summary:Preview measurements of the inflow by turbine-mounted lidar systems can be used to optimise wind turbine performance or alleviate structural loads. However, nacelle-mounted lidars suffer data losses due to unfavourable environmental conditions and laser beam obstruction by the rotating blades. Here, we apply proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to the simulated line-of-sight wind speed measurements of a turbine-mounted scanning lidar obtained from two large eddy simulations. This work aimed at identifying the dominant POD modes that can be used to subsequently derive a reduced-order representation of the turbine inflow. Secondly, we reconstructed the data points lost due to blade passage by using Gappy-POD. We found that only a few modes are required to capture the dynamics of the wind field parameters commonly used for lidar-assisted wind turbine control, such as the effective wind speed, vertical shear and directional misalignment. By evaluating turbine-relevant metrics in the time and frequency domain, we found that a ten-mode reconstruction could accurately describe most spatio-temporal variations in the inflow. Furthermore, a modal interpretation is presented by direct comparison with these wind field parameters. We found that the Gappy-POD method performs substantially better than spatial interpolation techniques, accurately reconstructing up to even 50% of missing data. A POD-based wind field reconstruction offers a trade-off between wind field reconstruction techniques requiring flow assumptions and more complex physics-based representations, offers dimensional reduction and can overcome the blade passage limitation of nacelle-mounted lidar systems.
ISSN:2072-4292