Building on the success of their collaboration on the ReLACs project (retrofitted lidar assisted control using a simplified wind turbine lidar solution – Wind Energy Science Conference 2023, https://zenodo.org/records/8037351), ZX and sowento have embarked on a further, new initiative to demonstrate the benefits of ZX Continuous Wave (CW) Lidars for Lidar Assisted Control (LAC). The initiative will explore the commercial gains that LAC needs to provide, the ways in which ZX CW solutions can meet those gains and the robustness and sensitivity of the predicted ZX CW LAC cost-benefit. The defined project scope will cover a broad range of turbine segments including onshore, offshore and floating turbine systems, all of differing rotor sizes, and for both standalone turbines and wind farm accumulated benefit.
“ZX is investing to help our industry advance in areas where real and tangible benefits can be made to reduce the levelized cost of energy of wind farms – be that improving turbine capability and performance, increasing project life, or optimising annual production. We are very pleased to be working with our friends at sowento again to maximise the outcome of this important Lidar Assisted Control initiative.”
— Steven White, Director of Turbine mounted lidar at ZX
“Lidar-assisted control is a core expertise of sowento and we are happy to advance the technology in a collaboration with ZX Lidars”, adds Steffen Raach, Managing Director of sowento. “We have formed a strong project team working on the different project topics with our lidar experts David Schlipf, a world-wide leading expert on lidar-assisted control, and Wei Fu, a lidar expert who just completed her dissertation at DTU on the characterization of turbulence using nacelle-based lidar systems,” explains Steffen. “This project is another step towards the realization of having nacelle-based lidar systems on every future wind turbine, ” adds David
About ZX Lidars (formerly ZephIR Lidar)
ZX Lidars provides industry-leading wind lidar products, ZX 300, ZX 300M and ZX TM for wind energy and meteorological applications. These Lidars deliver accurate wind measurements in both onshore and offshore applications at measurement heights / ranges across the full swept area of the blades of modern wind turbines, and beyond. With more than 30 million hours of operation in the field and over 10,000 deployments (and counting), ZX Lidars has pioneered the use of Lidar in the wind industry. The company is proud of the many world firsts it has achieved with customers including: upwind measurements from a turbine nacelle, turbine wake studies, offshore deployments of both fixed and floating wind lidar, an industry-accepted validation process, re-financing and re-powering of a wind farm, successful demonstration of measurement accuracy in a wind tunnel and total wind project financing from a lidar without need for a met mast.
More information can be found at www.zxlidars.com and on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/zx-lidars/
About sowento
sowento is an engineering consultancy and technology advisor, with its main business fields in lidar technology and floating wind as well as control applications. sowento is a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart and provides modelling, simulation and control solutions to various stakeholders of the wind energy industry. Our contribution to realize strong renewable energies is to strengthen them through innovation from research, empower the wind energy community, our team, and individuals to develop high quality results, knowledge, and smart technical solutions and to aim for the problems of today and tomorrow.
The team of sowento has more than 10 years experience in developing, customizing, and testing lidar-assisted control solutions for various wind turbines and sites. The main services in the lidar technology business are technology consultancy – proof of concepts and feasibility study of lidar- assisted control, advanced lidar-assisted controller design and data processing, performance assessment: power and load optimization with lidar-assisted control, field- testing and integrated design of lidar control and software solutions for lidar technology.
More information can be found on www.sowento.com and on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/sowento/