Dynamic Rotational Speed Monitoring of Wind Turbines with a Multi-Station FMCW Radar System

Conventional wind turbine rotational speed monitoring systems face major drawbacks, such as nacellemounted sensors are intrusive and maintenance-intensive, while non-contact optical methods fail in adverse weather. This paper proposes a ground-based, multi-station FMCW radar system offering (1) all-weather, non-intrusive operation, (2) resistance to lightning strikes and lightning electromagnetic pulses (LEMP), and (3) continuous, high-accuracy monitoring. Key features include an STM32-controlled hardware-synchronized dual-radar setup for wide coverage, a chirp time-offset scheme for interference suppression, and a Doppler event extraction algorithm with adaptive peak detection for precise rotational speed estimation. Experiments validate its reliability for robust wind farm monitoring.