The aim of this paper is to answer the question: Are the Łódź Hills
useful for electrical energy production from wind energy or not? Due to
access to short-term data related to wind measurements (the period of
2008 and 2009) from a local meteorological station, the measure –
correlate – predict approach have been applied. Long-term (1979‒2016)
reference data were obtained from ECWMF
ERA-40 Reanalysis.
Artificial neural networks were used to calculate predicted wind speed.
The obtained average wind speed and wind power density was 4.21 ms⁻¹
and 70 Wm⁻¹, respectively, at 10 m above ground
level (5.51 ms⁻¹, 170 Wm⁻¹ at 50 m).
From the point of view of Polish wind conditions, Łódź Hills may be
considered useful for wind power engineering.
The underground complicated testing environment and the fan operation instability cause large random errors and outliers of the wind speed signals. The outliers and large random errors result in distortion of mine wind speed monitoring, which possesses safety hazards in mine ventilation system. Application of Kalman filter in velocity monitoring can improve the accuracy of velocity measurement and eliminate the outliers. Adaptive Kalman Filter was built by automatically adjusting process noise covariance and measurement noise covariance depending on the differences between measured and expected speed signals. We analyzed the fluctuation of airflow flow using data of wind speed flow and distribution characteristics of the tunnel obtained by the Laser Doppler Velocimetry system (LDV) studies. A state-space model was built based on the tunnel airflow fluctuations and wind speed signal distribution. The adaptive Kalman Filter was calculated according to the actual measurement data and the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The adaptive Kalman filter was used to shield fluid pulsation while preserving system-induced fluctuations. Using the Kalman filter to treat offline wind speed signal acquired by LDV, the reliability of Kalman filter wind speed state model and the characteristics of adaptive Kalman Filter were investigated. Results showed that the adaptive Kalman filter effectively eliminated the outliers and reduced the root-mean-squares error (RMSE), and the adaptive Kalman filter had better performance than the traditional Kalman filter in eliminating outliers and reducing RMSE. Field experiments in online wind speed monitoring were conducted using the optimized adaptive Kalman Filter. Results showed that adaptive Kalman filter treatment could monitor the wind speed with smaller RMSE compared with LVD monitor. The study data demonstrated that the adaptive Kalman filter is reliable and suitable for online signal processing of mine wind speed monitor.
Types of wind storms in Poland and examples of economic damage, threats to human life and health caused by two extreme wind events are presented. Then, a house with the roof blown-off during the derecho wind storm in Poland on August 11-12, 2017, is considered. Based on the rafter framing of the house, i.e. wooden roof structure elements and roof covered, the weight of the roof is calculated. Two cases of the strong connection between rafter plates and knee walls are estimated. With the estimation of connection strength between rafter plates and knee walls, it was possible to calculate the total force required to blow-off the roof of the house. Next, an aerodynamic force acting on the house is calculated using pressure coefficients for a low-rise house with a gable roof. The pressure coefficients were taken from the Tokyo Polytechnic University aerodynamic database. The aerodynamic force acting on the roof blown-off was calculated for a low-rise building with a gable roof for similar ratios for length, width, and height. Three wind directions, for the unknown orientation of the building, were considered, i.e. the wind direction perpendicular, parallel, and oblique to the gable wall. By comparison, the aerodynamic force with the total force required to blow-off the roof of the house, it was possible to calculate the critical wind speed needed for the roof blown-off. This wind speed is much bigger than measured by meteorological stations on the path of the derecho.