In trials at a turbulent wind project in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the new hardware and software upgrade was shown to be capable of calculating wind speeds despite the complexity of the wind, the company said.
The Flow Complexity Recognition (FCR) upgrade to the company's Windcube V2 has been tested by the Technical University of Denmark's wind R&D centre.
Previously, lidar systems have struggled to measure wind speeds at more technical sites, failing to provide sufficiently accurate measurements when the wind speed is not uniform horizontally.
The FCR upgrade uses a fifth beam to account for the impact of the terrain complexity on the measurements. With the upgrade, Leosphere claims that the lidar can achieve a measurement difference of only 1.5% at complex sites.
The Hrgud wind farm was chosen for the field testing as it is a turbulent wind site, located on an oblong 100-metre high hill about 1.5 kilometres north of a 1,000-metre deep and 2,000-metre wide canyon.
In the tests, a 77.5-metre reference met mast was erected alongside a Windcube V2 lidar. Calculations were made with both the regular Windcube and the FCR-upgraded machine. The results showed that the use of the FCR led to a reduction of the measurement bias from -4.1% to +1.5% compared to the cup anemometer met mast.
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