About offshore resource assessment with floating lidars with special respect to turbulence and extreme events

Abstract

Offshore resource assessment with lidars on floating platforms is a flexible and particularly cost-effective alternative to the conventional meteorological mast solution, that is considered as onshore state-of-the-art transferred to offshore sites, and may enable better and more complete wind resource assessments for the growing offshore wind sector. Wind lidar technology, and remote sensing in general, has already been proven to be a very promising technology for resource assessment and power performance testing onshore. For offshore applications and on floating platforms in particular, the motions from the floating base have to be considered in addition, affecting the wind measurements significantly and causing systematic measurement errors.We have studied the motions and the corresponding influences on lidar measurements generated by different possible offshore platforms – vessels or buoys – both in detailed simulations as well as first validation experiments. In addition to this, we have developed motion compensation algorithms that allow to correct the affected measurements and retrieve the undisturbed wind data. The motions considered and studied comprise rotations as well as translations in all six degrees of freedom.For the evaluation of the motion-affected and corrected wind data in this paper, special attention is paid to the measurement of turbulence as well as extreme wind events. The research question to be answered is if a lidar device placed on a floating platform is capable of measuring more or less the same statistics of extreme wind events as a fixed lidar device. Quantities to be investigated are: the turbulence intensity as well as the statistics of maximum wind speed values within a 10-min period, but also wind speed increments on different time scales. At this, obviously two issues are to be discussed – the influence of the lidar measurement principle on the recording of extreme wind events, and the additional impact of the superimposed motions of the floating platform.