Real-time three dimensional wind field reconstruction from nacelle LiDAR measurements

In recent years, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has emerged as a feasible, reliable and accurate remote sensing technology for wind speed measurements. For a fine and performant use of the LiDAR data in turbine control and monitoring applications, adapted and sophisticated real-time processing is needed. With the objective to retrieve accurate enhanced information from the sensor raw data, this paper aims to present solution to estimate, in three dimensions and in real time, incoming wind characteristics, such as wind speed, wind direction and instantaneous shears. An innovative reconstruction is proposed based on recursive weighted least squares method. The approach is validated for pulsed nacelle LiDAR systems with simulated data, obtained with a specifically developed wind generator tool, including a representative LiDAR Wind Iris TC model.