Investigation of doppler features resulting from wind turbine scattering

The rapid growth in the number of large wind farms has raised serious concerns about their effects on existing radar systems. The large size and rotational movement of the turbine blades can give rise to significant Doppler clutters, which interfere with the detection of moving targets such as aircraft and storms. A previous Air Force study has collected and analyzed the time-varying radar cross section resulting from the blade rotation of a single 1.5 MW turbine. However, multiple interactions taking place in a turbine were not studied in detail. Multiple interactions could play an important role in the propagation of radar signals through wind farms. This thesis sets out to more closely examine the various Doppler features resulting from the scattering due to a single turbine. Backscattered and forward scattered data are measured at Ku-band from various wind turbine models using a motorized turntable in the laboratory. The tested models include a 1:160 scale model turbine, a 3-arm wire model turbine, and a small wind turbine from Bergey Windpower with 2’ blades. The data are processed based on the short-time Fourier transform in order to relate the resulting time-varying Doppler features to various scattering mechanisms. The experimental findings are corroborated by simulations performed using the Numerical Electromagnetics Code (NEC). Furthermore, we propose a post-processing general method to reduce the intensity of the turbine scattered data. This method is applied to filter out simulated Doppler clutter from two different simulation techniques. First, the method is applied to remove the simulated Doppler clutter from the point scatterer model. Next, the algorithm is applied to simulated backscattered data generated using a high-frequency ray tracing code, Ahilo.