Now, See the wind!

In conventional wind turbine wind forces the blades to spin which in turn spins the generator as a result of which electricity is product. Though the mechanism seems to be very simple but it is not that easy. To commission a Wind generators the location need to have powerful winds almost through out the year and If they are not properly angled towards the more howling of these gales, they can be damaged or destroyed. Tweaking and adjusting turbines so that their blades can harness the strongest air currents rather than be harmed by them is a normal part of turbine management

Now there is an development in early detecting the wind speed. The basic technology, called lidar (short for light detection and ranging) has been around since the 1970s. It is similar to radar in that it sends out electromagnetic waves and then analyses those waves that bounce back, to determine what they bounced off. The difference is that radar depends on radio waves. These have long wavelengths and therefore bounce only off large things.

Lidar uses light waves. Light has a much shorter wavelength and is readily reflected from small objects—one reason that human vision relies on it. Crucially, the light waves used in wind lidar are reflected by tiny, naturally occurring particles like water droplets, dust, pollen and salt crystals that drift along at the precise speed of the wind

Experimentally lidar is being used to scan incoming wind and determine how it was behaving before it struck the turbine by Dr Mikkelsen and his colleagues. The lidars scanned the approaching winds with a laser that produced infra-red light with a wavelength of 1.55 microns. Reflected light was detected by a device so sensitive that it could pick up one returning photon (the quantum-mechanical particles of which light is composed) out of every thousand billion fired by the laser. The computer which analyses the lidar data can be connected to the motors that adjust the pitch of the turbine blades, in order to maximize energy production and reduce damage

The concept is under test stage and not sure whether it is commerically available.

Information source: economist.com
Image source: codeproject.com