Articles
Windfarms can interfere with traditional aviation radars (pictured)
An engineering company from Cambridge has said it has completed demonstrations at Glasgow Prestwick Airport of a radar system that prevents wind turbines interfering with air traffic control systems, paving the way for windfarms to be safely built near airports, it said.
Windfarms can interfere with traditional aviation radars by creating “scintillating” clouds of clutter, or flashes of light, on the air traffic controller’s systems. To the traditional radar, each turbine blade can look like the wing of an aircraft, which appears and disappears as the turbine rotates. This means that for some existing windfarms, air traffic has to be re-routed around these clutter clouds as it would be impossible for an air traffic controller to differentiate between the two and follow the track of an aircraft’s route. For these reasons, airports, the MoD and other authorities regularly object to the building of proposed windfarms.
Technology firm Aveillant said it had successfully completed a two-week live demonstration at Glasgow Prestwick Airport which it claimed demonstrated a holographic radar system that reliably removes wind turbines from airport radars with no degradation to radar performance, paving the way for wind farms to be safely built near airports.
In development for two years, the radar builds 3D trajectories of moving objects in its field of view and can intelligently differentiate between various types of objects such as aircraft or wind turbines. Subsequently, it can reliably detect aircraft and feed their positioning back to the air traffic control system in realtime, allowing controllers to have a consistent and accurate view of the aircraft at all times when passing over a windfarm, maintaining the safety of pilots and the public.
Unlike the current generation of air traffic control radar that scans an area using the familiar antenna rotating around a fixed point with a narrow beam, Aviellant's Holographic Radar looks in all directions at once. By permanently illuminating the entire 3D field of view, the radar sensor captures vast amounts of data which is then processed in real time by a combination of graphical and number crunching power in order to determine the dynamic characteristics of each individual target.
Aveillant was spun off from Cambridge Consultants in October 2011. Its technology has also been tested in the US.