Doppler LIDAR Wind Ranger | Wind Ranger 100/200
The Doppler Wind Lidar product family comprises compact, cost-effective and easy-to-use instruments for vertical determination of the 3D wind vector and turbulence quantities. They perform continuous VAD scans of the laser beam at a zenith angle of 10 degrees. The maximum scanner movement is 2 revolutions per second. While the Wind Ranger 100/200 uses a special FM-CW method for the lower 200 metres measurement height and thus allows measurement heights as low as 7 metres above ground, the Wind Ranger BL uses a pulsed transmission signal and determines the respective measurement heights from the runtime of the received signal.
Details
The Wind Ranger 100/200 are compact, cost efficient and easy to use wind lidars. They derive 3D wind vectors from continuous VAD scans (10 ° zenith angle) at a max. rotational speed of 2 rev./s for a designated measuring volume determined by the adjusted focal distance. Spectra are determined at a rate of 100 Hz which yields an angular resolution for each sample of approx. 3.6 °. Wind data are derived according to the adjusted averaging interval within 1 s … 30 minutes.
The innovative frequency modulation provides both, a wide wind measuring range and an unambiguous determination of the radial winds, so no extra wind sensing devices are needed at ground. The frequency modulation further prevents any bias in case of strong variations of back scattering along the line-of-sight observation which are typically caused by low hanging clouds or by distant (moving) obstacles positioned behind the measuring volume. A further high value bonus of the frequency modulation is the ability of online monitoring of the distance of the effective measuring height which allows identification and correction of extra contribution from low hanging clouds.
The Wind Ranger 100 offers up to 8 measuring heights within this range arbitrarily selected by the customer (e.g. 10 m, 15 m, 20 m, 30 m , 60 m, 90 m, 100 m). The Wind Ranger 200 extends the measuring range to 200 m and the number of selectable measuring heights to 20.
Because of the low energy consumption (< 60 W without a/c, extra 140 W with a/c), a stand-alone operation in combination with solar power and/or fuel cell generator is easy to achieve. The internal memory collects wind data over long periods avoiding the need of frequent site visits. For real time applications, the Wind Ranger 100/200 can be connected via ethernet to a PC or mobile router for LAN or modem based distribution of measured data.