Comparison of anemometers for turbulence characterization

Conference · Thu Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 1992

OSTI ID:7092648

Morris, V R; Barnard, J C; Wendell, L L; Tomich, S D

During the first phase of the US Department of Energy's turbulence characterization program, important discoveries were made about the field application of propeller-vane and cup anemometers under very turbulent conditions. First, averaged speeds measured by the propeller-vane anemometer were consistently lower than those from the cup anemometer, even though both registered virtually the same during wind-tunnel calibration testing. Second, the propeller-vane anemometers suffered from structural failures much more frequently than the cup anemometers. The difficulties associated with the use of the propeller-vane motivated us to consider the cup anemometer for turbulence measurements. At fast sample rates, the output of the cup anemometer is severely degraded by discretization error that stems from pulse counting demodulation. However, we found that a low-pass Gaussian filter could be applied to the time series of wind speed derived from the cup anemometer to yield time series and frequency spectra that compared very favorably with those obtained from the propeller-vane anemometer. This finding suggests that the cup anemometer may prove to be an inexpensive and rugged sensor appropriate for turbulence measurements for wind-energy applications.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest Lab., Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE; USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC06-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 7092648
• Report Number(s): PNL-SA-21321; CONF-921049--6; ON: DE93004336
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

17 WIND ENERGY
170600* -- Wind Energy Engineering
440800 -- Miscellaneous Instrumentation-- (1990-)
47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION
ANEMOMETERS
AVAILABILITY
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
EQUIPMENT
EVALUATION
FIELD TESTS
MACHINERY
MEASURING INSTRUMENTS
MEASURING METHODS
PERFORMANCE TESTING
TESTING
TURBINES
TURBOMACHINERY
TURBULENCE
VANES
VELOCITY
WIND
WIND TURBINES