14th January, 2014 - UK technology company, Aveillant, has successfully completed its two week live demonstrations at Glasgow Prestwick Airport which show that its Holographic Radar™ 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.
Having been in development for two years, the Holographic Radar™ builds 3D trajectories of moving objects in its field of view and can intelligently differentiate between various types of objects such as aircrafts or wind turbines. Subsequently, it can reliably detect aircrafts and feed their positioning back to the Air Traffic Control system in real-time, allowing controllers to have a consistent and accurate view of the aircraft at all times when passing over a wind farm, maintaining the safety of pilots and the public.
Wind farms interfere with traditional aviation radars by creating scintillating clouds of clutter on the air traffic controller’s view. To the traditional radar, each turbine blade looks like the wing of an aircraft which appears and disappears as the turbine rotates. This means that for existing wind farms, 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 wind farms causing 5GW of wind power to remain on hold.
Unlike the current generation of ATC radar that scans an area using the familiar antenna rotating around a fixed point with a narrow beam, the Holographic Radar™ constantly 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 GPU and CPU power in order to determine the dynamic characteristics of each individual target.
"The processing of these large quantities of data would have previously required around a thousand Cray super computers, costing millions and consuming a substantial amount of energy themselves," said Peter Wurmsdobler, lead software engineer at Aveillant. "Boston Ltd was able to deliver high performance NVIDIA GPU-powered computers from Supermicro UK, making it both technically and economically viable to continuously process all data captured".