Sibelloptics, a Boulder, Colo. early-stage company, has been selected as a presenting company at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Industry Growth Forum. The annual forum provides a venue for clean energy innovators to maximize their exposure to capital investors and strategic partners.
NREL’s Industry Growth Forum has been the foremost clean energy investment event for over 20 years.
Sibelloptics is one of 30 companies chosen from a competitive application process to participate in the 2015 event, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Denver, Colorado on November 3 and 4. The objective of the forum is to introduce innovative, clean-tech companies to clean energy investors and the business community. More than $5 billion in investment capital has been raised by participating companies since 2003.
The team of scientists and engineers at Sibelloptics, an Innosphere client company, have decades of experience building a wide range of Lasers and optical systems. After successfully building a compact and rugged fiber-optic Laser Radar system (called Lidar), which was funded by NASA, Sibelloptics has manufactured its first commercial Lidar system, dubbed Windimager, to be delivered to a wind farm on the Caribbean island of Aruba in mid-September of this year.
Sibelloptic’s Windimager is an all-fiber system that outputs 350-µJ pulses due to intellectual property developed using several NASA grants.
Unlike Radar, a Lidar system can see clear-air wind events, or winds not associated with heavy cloud formation. Originally developed to detect and measure the wake vortices produced by aircraft wings, Windimager also has the ability to perform long-term, high-resolution mapping of the wind resource, thereby improving efficiency at wind farms and reducing the cost of wind-source electricity and increasing the Annual Energy Production (AEP) of a given wind farm. Lidar can also see other atmospheric events such as wind shear and microbursts.
Windimager’s innovative technology and unique capabilities make it a valuable tool in a broad range of applications, including wind energy, aviation, pollution tracking, meteorology, defense and security, emergency response, and others.
Sibelloptic’s Windimager is an all-fiber system that outputs 350-µJ pulses due to intellectual property developed using several NASA grants. As a result it is the only all-fiber system that can produce real-time wind velocity data beyond 10km. This range is required for wind farm resource assessment and to give warning of rogue gusts (which can destroy turbines) or dying winds. It is also a requirement for other applications such as aviation and pollution monitoring.
The scanner can perform continuous azimuthal and elevation scans allowing it to produce continuous 3D scans of the entire wind farm. It does not need to stare in a single direction and perform thousands of averages but computes and displays the data point-by-point. In addition, it is the only Lidar in the world, says its developer, with the capability to dynamically change the pulse width, allowing it to change it’s spatial resolution for applications such as vortex detection.
Windimager’s range gates are adjustable from 7.5 to 50m without complicated and questionable post-processing algorithms. Windimager is larger than the short-range systems that only see out 200 to 400m but is close to the Leosphere 400S-AT size and certainly much smaller than other longer range systems. In addition, it is mobile and can be unloaded and operational in 30 min. Lastly, the frequency range of ±127 MHz lets Windimager see wind velocities greater than any of its competitors, up to ± 220 mph (or a class F4 tornado).
Sibelloptics does business as (DBA) Wind Imaging Technologies and can be reached at Windimager.com
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