A DSP Measuring System for Wind Monitoring

Renewable energies such as wind power are becoming more and more widespread, but the reliable operation of future energy supply structures, with high share of distributed generation and renewable energy sources, is an important and highly complex task, due to the output power fluctuation of the renewable energies that may cause excess variation of voltage or frequency of the grid. The availability of information about wind direction and speed is an important information in order to control, or to predict, the generated output power of large wind farm. In this paper, the planning, the realization and the characterization of a measuring instrument able to calculate wind direction and speed in real-time is presented. The system in future development will also be charged by typical tasks of a smart meter, so high computational power and fast data transmission will be required. For these reasons, a digital signal processor (DPS) based architecture and real-time communication protocols and library (Real Time Data Exchange - RTDX) were chosen. In the prototype implementation, the instrument is interfaced to a host PC that stores and shows the received data with a proper software program implemented in Labview environment. So, the main advantage is the possibility to monitor the time of flight in real time using a low expenditure of power and cheap instrument. Finally, some preliminary experimental results about characterization and precision of a prototype of the proposed instrument are shown.