Comment by Sharlin
2 years ago
Amazing. Reminds me of the fact that militaries really don't want wind turbines in areas where good radar coverage is important (case in point: the Finnish Defense Forces anywhere near the Russian border); even though the blades aren't metal, they're still a source of noise and radar shadow.
I'm not at all knowledgable about this, but: is it feasible (and if so, hard?) or impossible to have some sort of live reporting from the turbines about the speed/position of their blades that connects to the radar system allowing it to ignore what it knows to be turbine noise/shadow and therefore be able to have turbines there and still get good radar?
Well, you can't just ignore a radar shadow or noise. Just like GP's point-to-point microwave link couldn't just "ignore" the crane. You can't make a bad Wi-fi connection faster by just telling your computer to ignore the wall between you and the hot spot. A wind turbine is a solid obstacle that conceals stuff behind it, and even if a single turbine might not be a big deal, most commonly someone interested in harnessing wind power would want to build an entire farm, which would be much worse.
My (probably ignorant) thinking was that if there weren't propellers, just stalks, they could be arranged in a pattern that radar setups at multiple locations could see through gaps and between them have no dark spaces caused by the towers. Leaving the problem that the blades essentially block out an entire circle, but if the radar software knows the position of every turbine's blades (by a combination of turbines reporting location/speed/acceleration of blades in real time and maybe modelling so the radar system can know in time at least fairly if not very accurately where all blades are in a field of them) then when a radar bounces of one it can say "that doesn't count as a hit" leaving only non-turbine objects showing up in the UI that the radar setup outputs?
Is it that radar can't ping / receive at a high enough frequency to distinguish the difference between "this fraction of a ms the blade was at that location so we don't care about the radar hitting something, but the next fraction of a ms the blade had moved and we still got a ping from just behind it so there's something there"? Or some other problem with the idea?
7 replies →
Even if you ignored the turbines themselves, there would still be a "shadow" behind the turbines though I think? Which means you'd have a blind spot every now and then (when the wind is blowing and the turbines are active) which could be exploited by an enemy
Even if you are looking at the turbines "edge-on," there's probably going to be a noticeable Doppler return as well.
Plastic drones with plastic propellers are still visible on radar because the tiny propellers spin super fast, so they light up like a Christmas tree on Doppler radar because the approaching vs receding velocities of the blades are so different.
2 replies →