Advanced Data Acquisition System for Wind Energy Applications

Abstract

Today renewable energies, particularly wind energy are important to meet 24 hour energy demands while keeping car­bon emissions low. As the cost of renewable energies are high, improving their efficiency is a key factor to reduce energy prices. High quality experimental data is essential to develop deeper understanding of the existing systems and to improve their efficiency.
This paper introduces an unmanned airborne data acquisition system that can measure properties around wind-turbines to pro­vide new insight into aerodynamic performance and loss mech­anisms and to provide validation data for wind-turbine design methods. The described system is a flexible and portable platform for collecting high quality data from existing full-scale wind-tur­bine installations. This allows experiments to be conducted with­out scaling and with real-world boundary conditions.
The system consists of two major parts: the unmanned flying platform (UAV) and the data acquisition system (DAQ). For the UAV a commercially available unit is selected, which has the ability to fly a route autonomously with sufficient preci­sion, the ability to hover, and sufficient load capacity to carry the DAQ system. The DAQ system in contrast, is developed in-house to achieve a high quality data collection capability and to increase flexibility.