Electricity generation in rural communities is an acute problem militating against socioeconomic well-being of the populace in these communities in developing countries, including Nigeria. In this paper, assessments of wind-energy potential in selected sites from three major geopolitical zones of Nigeria were investigated. For this, daily wind-speed data from Katsina in northern, Warri in south...

Recent research has demonstrated exciting potential for wind plant control systems to improve the cost of energy of wind plants. Wind plant controls seek to improve global wind plant performance over control systems in which each turbine optimizes only its individual performance by accounting for the way wind turbines interact through their wakes. While these technologies can be applied to exis...

Wind energy production is very sensitive to instantaneous wind speed fluctuations. Thus rapid variation of wind speed due to changes in the local meteorological conditions can lead to electrical power variations of the order of the nominal power output. In small grid as they exist on islands (French West Indies) such fluctuations can cause instabilities in case of intermediate power shortages. ...

With the rapid growth of wind energy installed capacity, optimized maintenance has gained increasingly attentions from both researchers and wind farm owners. Conditionbased maintenance (CBM) has been introduced to the wind energy industry in order to ensure the availability and safety of the wind energy conversion (WEC) system, while minimize the operating and maintenance (O&M) costs. In this p...

Exploiting wind-energy is one possible way to extend flight duration for Unmanned Arial Vehicles. Wind-energy can also be used to minimise energy consumption for a planned path. In this paper, we consider uncertain time-varying wind fields and plan a path through them. A Gaussian distribution is used to determine uncertainty in the Time-varying wind fields. We use Markov Decision Process to pla...

Global brightness temperature observations of TOPEX/Poseidon microwave radiometer (TMR) at 18, 21, and 37 GHz have been collocated with near-simultaneous SeaWinds wind vector data as well as with monthly sea surface temperature and salinity products. The combined data allow us to study the dependence of zenith-directed ocean surface emissivity, at each frequency, upon both wind speed and direct...

Two-day-old male cowpea weevils, Callosobruchus maculatus, fly upwind to a point source of female sex pheromone at three wind speeds. All beetles initiating flight along the pheromone plume make contact with the pheromone source. Analysis of digitized flight tracks indicates that C. maculatus males respond similarly to moths tested at several wind speeds. Beetles’ mean net upwind speeds and spe...

Wind pollination is predominantly a derived condition in angiosperms and is thought to evolve in response to ecological conditions that render animal pollination less advantageous. However, the specific ecological and evolutionary mechanisms responsible for transitions from animal to wind pollination are poorly understood in comparison with other major reproductive transitions in angiosperms, i...

Of all the issues surrounding noise emissions from wind farms, the question of the potential for annoyance and adverse effects from low frequency sound is one of the most topical. Anecdotal literature is replete with statements concerning the effects of infrasound and low frequency noise. In this paper we present objective methodologies to measure and assess infrasound and low frequency noise i...

This paper explores the possibility of estimating smallscale vector wind fields from SAR data by applying certain dynamical constraints to the wind field. The method is illustrated for the case of a diverging surface flow field that is intended to represent a precipitationinduced downdraft. A simulated radar cross section map generated from this flow field is used to reconstruct the wind field ...