BirdScan MV1
Adaptive wind park managment
The monitoring system allows the adaptive management of wind parks to mitigate collisions of migratory birds and bats with wind turbines. If the collision risk exceeds the specified threshold, the system alarms the plant operator or can automatically communicate with the wind park controls.
General description
BirdScan MV1 is a compact radar system for the continuous monitoring and risk management in wind farms. It uses a vertically directed conically shaped wide aperture beam to collect a rich set of information of the biomass in the sky. It does automatic real time quantification and classification that is used in the adaptive management algorithm to compute the collision risk, considering also environmental conditions like visibility and wind speed.
Comparison to traditional bird-radars
Traditional horizontally or vertically rotating bird-radars only illuminate a target for a fraction of second and wing-flapping pattern cannot be recorded. Therefore non-bird echos like insects cannot be properly excluded. In traditional rotating radars the surveyed volume is generally not well-defined and therefore computation of MTR is problematic.
Example of echo from a bird recorded system
The wing-flapping pattern is recorded and can be extracted automatically, here a continuously flapping bird with 8 wing-beats per second.
Placement
Wind Turbines
Like for any radar, rotating blades within the measurement beam would produce strong disturbances. For good measurement results, the radar should therefore be placed with a minimum distance of approx. 150 m to the turbine center.
Offshore deployment
The system can be deployed offshore on any platform. It is therefore protected for offshore conditions. See following images:
Option 1: container
Server and processing module protected in a container; radar antenna on top of container protected by a small radome.
Option 2: large radome
Standard compact MR1 system protected by a larger Radome (approx. 1.5 m width * 1.6 m height).
Option 3: research platform
BirdScan MT1 has been used by Schulz et al. (2014) at Alpha Ventus. It was situated at the FINO1 research platform. Offshore deployment therefore has been proven successful.
High quality offline-analytics
The BirdScan radar systems can reliably detect even small passerines, bats and insects. Hundreds of thousands echos per month can be recorded. To leverage the full potential of this data, detailed off-line analytic can be performed.
Product Specification
| Features and functionality | Details |
| usage | adaptive management |
| area of application | risk mitigation, continuous long term monitoring |
| sensing technology | pulse radar |
| antenna system | corrugated horn (rotating) |
| transmitter frequency | x-band fixed |
| transmitting power | 25 kW peak |
| range (height) | 750 m |
| resolution in space | 10 m |
| shutdown algorithm based on: | – spatiotemporal distribution – classification – mean traffic rate – environmental conditions |
| raw data | available for offline analyses |
| mean traffic rate | selectable heights |
| raw data | available for offline analyses |
| operation | automatic 24 h |
| electrical connection | 1x230V 400W |
| communication | LAN / WAN / GPRS |
| weight | Approx. 100 kg |
| environmental design | MIL STD 810 F |
| climate kit (optional) | HVAC, 1x230V 700W, 30kg |
| offshore kit (optional) | available |
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