Building on the success of their collaboration on the ReLACs project, ZX Lidars and sowento have embarked on a further, new initiative to demonstrate the benefits of ZX Continuous Wave (CW) Lidars for Lidar Assisted Control (LAC).

The initiative will explore the commercial gains that LAC needs to provide, the ways in which ZX CW solutions can meet those gains and the robustness and sensitivity of the predicted ZX CW LAC cost-benefit. The defined project scope will cover a broad range of turbine segments including onshore, offshore and floating turbine systems, all of differing rotor sizes, and for both standalone turbines and wind farm accumulated benefit.

“ZX is investing to help our industry advance in areas where real and tangible benefits can be made to reduce the levelized cost of energy of wind farms – be that improving turbine capability and performance, increasing project life, or optimizing annual production. We are very pleased to be working with our friends at sowento again to maximize the outcome of this important Lidar Assisted Control initiative.” added Steven White, Director of Turbine mounted lidar at ZX.

"Lidar-assisted control is a core expertise of sowento and we are happy to advance the technology in a collaboration with ZX Lidars", says Steffen Raach, Managing Director of sowento. "We have formed a strong project team working on the different project topics with our lidar experts David Schlipf, a world-wide leading expert on lidar-assisted control, and Wei Fu, a lidar expert who just completed her dissertation at DTU on the characterization of turbulence using nacelle-based lidar systems," explains Steffen. "This project is another step towards the realization of having nacelle-based lidar systems on every future wind turbine, " adds David Schlipf.