July 16th, 2009

MICHIGAN AEROSPACE CORPORATION ANNOUNCES DOE WIND ENERGY GRANT

Michigan Aerospace Corporation, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) National Wind Technology Center, has been awarded a Department of Energy (DOE) grant for approximately $748K to apply the company’s advanced, laser-based atmospheric measurement technology to wind turbine control. Michigan Aerospace will work with NREL to integrate, test, and optimize Michigan Aerospace’s Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instrument that measures wind speed/direction, temperature, and density at long distances. By measuring winds and other atmospheric properties well in advance of the turbine and integrating those measurements with the turbine’s control system, stresses on the turbine blades and internal components can be significantly reduced. Ultimately, this work is intended to demonstrate that turbine maintenance and repair costs can be reduced, leading to longer lifetimes and more reliable energy output, while also expanding a turbine’s power curve performance. Additionally, with advanced forecasting of wind speed and direction, it is anticipated that energy capture can be increased by optimal turbine pointing.

“DOE’s investment will help us improve two of the most critical areas in wind energy: reducing maintenance costs and increasing efficiency. The most exciting aspect is that this funding opens the door to improving atmospheric measurements and forecasting not only for turbine control, but onshore and offshore site assessment, operational farms, and grid management,” said Michigan Aerospace CEO Peter Tchoryk.

The company is preparing for high volume manufacturing of this product line through its spin-off, OptoAtmospherics. Scientific, engineering, and manufacturing jobs are expected to result, with demand growing along with the wind energy industry. This technology is also being applied to defense, aviation, and homeland security applications.

For the full story, visit: http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7653.htm

May 22nd, 2009

ATMOSPHERIC WIND AND TEMPERATURE SYSTEM ARRIVES IN PERU

The Second Generation Optimized Fabry-Perot Doppler Imager (SOFDI), designed and built by Michigan Aerospace Corporation, arrived at the Geophysical Institute of Peru Huancayo Geophysical Observatory located at the magnetic equator in Peru. SOFDI is a portable, unmanned, remote-controlled instrument constructed to measure continuous 24-hour (i.e., nighttime and daytime) winds and temperatures from the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere. These measurements will test a hypothesis about the stability of the F-layer which would predict disturbances in the ionosphere. Such ionospheric disturbances cause radio communication disruptions.

Dr. Andrew Gerrard of the New Jersey Institute of Technology said “Michigan Aerospace designed and built SOFDI to serve multiple roles; an incredibly difficult challenge that turned out to be an utter success. We are able to make measurements not previously possible." Daytime measurements of winds and temperatures based on the 630 nm emission from thermospheric atomic oxygen (OI) have been difficult to obtain in the past because of the large solar background continuum which overpowers the comparatively weak emission. The novel triple-etalon Fabry-Perot interferometer in the SOFDI instrument filters out the solar background and enables the measurement of this 630nm emission during the daytime. Dr. Gerrard continues, “The quality, tuning control, and overall performance of the three etalons in SOFDI is exceptional.”

SODFI was funded by a Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and by the NSF Aeronomy Program. The project was led by Dr. John Meriwether of Clemson University and Dr. Andrew Gerrard, currently at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This project was initially funded so that the 24-hour ground-based wind measurements from SOFDI could be used to validate in-situ wind measurements from the Air Force Communications/Navigations Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite. C/NOFS is part of an intensive space weather modeling effort that will attempt to predict the low latitude occurrence of Equatorial Spread-F (ESF). SOFDI promises to test recent theories suggesting the timing of the reversal of the zonal wind from west to east is an important predictor of ESF development.