Towards radar barriers for animal fatality detection at wind turbines: numerical and preliminary experimental results

Abstract

Bats and birds are endangered by wind turbines, leading to a significant amount of fatalities in recent years, mainly due to a direct collision of the animals with the rotor blades or through barotrauma effects. The search for fatalities and the quantification of their number is an important tool to understand the adverse effects of wind turbines on bats and birds. This method has several problems: Cadavers do not always remain on site due to predators, only a part of the relevant area on the ground can be searched manually and not all fatalities can be found. This leads to the fact that searches, although extremely valuable in the analysis of animal mortality, are hardly used in practice due to the high effort and enormous costs. The present work closes this research gap by proposing a radar barrier approach that automatically detects animal fatality in real-time. Therefore, three FMCW radar systems are attached to the tower of a wind turbine at different heights. Subsequent processing of time-of-flight information enables a binary classification of whether a fatality was observed or not. This study presents the results from numerical simulations as well as preliminary experimental results for a proof of concept.