Date posted: 06/14/2009*

As the demand for “green,” renewable energy sources quickly increases, so too does the difficulty in the tracking capabilities of Britain’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS).

Wind farms across Britain are currently creating disturbances on 2-D radar systems, otherwise known as “blackout zones.” The doppler return depicts “false targets” and noise, causing commercial and military aircraft to disappear on the radar.

Aside from losing the exact position of the aircraft, the Royal Air Force is also concerned that enemy bombers or other aircraft could potentially hide behind interference from offshore wind farms and approach Britain undetected.

To combat this issue, the NATS group has asked Raytheon to create a radar system capable of operating through these interferences by filtering out the wind farm noise, or “clutter,” from other radar signals.

“Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure,” said Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada.

Five Techniques

As a result of a U.K. feasibility contract awarded to Raytheon in 2006, the company has developed five techniques that will allow current and future radars to discriminate between aircraft and turbines. They include concurrent beam processing, implementing clutter maps for each doppler filter, Enhanced Constant False Alarm Rate processing techniques, track eligibility algorithms and advanced tracking algorithms.

Once the project is completed in the U.K., there are plans to deploy the technology in the Netherlands.

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