Investigation of wind farm effects on radar multiple target tracking

The increasing demand on wind farm (WF) installations has been raising the necessity and significance of performance assessment of electronic systems in the vicinity of WFs. Using a signal model for WF scattering, the interaction between the wind turbines (WTs) and pulse-Doppler radars (PDRs), the effects of WTs on the PDRs' detection and tracking processes are investigated in this study. The extensive examination in this study provides insightful perspectives on the tracking performance of PDRs that are employing global nearest neighbor or probabilistic data association methods for the multiple target tracking operation under WF scatterings by exhibiting statistical metrics related to the track losses, false tracks depending on several system parameters, and WF configurations. Additionally, a novel WF design approach that is focused on minimizing WF effects on radar tracking performance is proposed in this study. The signal and tracking model employed in the examination provides a baseline for the analysis for WF-radar interactions, and the proposed WF design approach is promising to minimize the deteriorating effects of WFs on radar tracking performance.