A numerical framework for constraining synthetic wind fields with lidar measurements for improved load simulations

Remote wind sensing technologies, such as lidar, are becoming more and more mature and the wind energy industry is rapidly adopting them for a variety of purposes. One of these use cases is utilizing lidar measurements from a nacelle mounted device in order to improve the accuracy of load simulations by creating more realistic synthetic wind inputs. In this work we present an open source numerical framework, called ViConDAR for "Virtual Constrained turbulence and liDAR measurements", used for simulating lidar measurements and applying them as constraints in synthetic wind field generation. A realistic lidar simulator is used to obtain the virtual lidar measurements by scanning a synthetic w…