Ultrasonic wind speed and direction sensor
The Compact Weather Sensor PCTAN012 is belongs to the product family of professional intelligent measurement transducers with digital interface for environmental applications. For extreme conditions (eg. marine environments, wind turbines), it available a metal version.
Ultrasonic sensor technology is used to take the measurements for:
Wind direction;
Wind speed.
Measurement output can be accessed by the following protocolls:
UMB-Binary
UMB-ASCII
SDI-12
NMEA (PCTAN013; PCTAN016)
MODBUS
The wind meter uses 4 ultrasonic sensors which take cyclical measurements in all directions. The resulting wind speed and direction are calculated from the measured run - time sound differential. The sensor delivers a quality out- put signal indicating how many valid readings were taken during the measurement interval.
In accordance with the specified sampling rate, the value of the last measurement is transmitted when the current measurement value is requested. Each measurement is stored in a circular buffer for the subsequent calculation of minimum, maximum and average values.
When requesting the minimum and maximum values, the corresponding value is calculated - via the circular buffer at the interval (1-10 minutes) specified in the configuration - and transmitted.
When requesting the average value, this is calculated - via the circular buffer at the interval (1-10 minutes) specified in the configuration - and transmitted. In this way moving averages can also be calculated.
For some values the standard deviation is calculated for the same interval. The calculation of standard deviation will only be activated after the related UMB channel has been requested for the first time.
For wind measurement, values are calculated vectorially. To this end, the average values of the vectors are generated internally. Hence the value (wind speed) and angle (wind direction) of the vector are calculated.