SBIR-STTR Award

Innovative Signal Processing Techniques for Mitigation of Wind Turbine Farm Interference in Airborne Radar Systems
Award last edited on: 11/12/2018

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : Navy
Total Award Amount
$1,149,893
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
N141-003
Principal Investigator
Vincent Amuso

Company Information

Upstate Scientific

207 Winchester Drive
New Hartford, NY 13413
   (315) 527-0707
   upstatescientific@yahoo.com
   www.upstatescientific.com
Location: Single
Congr. District: 22
County: Oneida

Phase I

Contract Number: N68335-14-C-0245
Start Date: 5/15/2014    Completed: 11/17/2014
Phase I year
2014
Phase I Amount
$149,986
Stationary movers (wind turbines, etc.) adversely affect the interference rejection, detection and tracking processes of airborne radars. This impact is more severe for surveillance of difficult targets (stealth aircraft, slow moving drones, and surface targets). Wind farms are comprised of multiple wind turbines with rotating blades reaching to heights of 500ft. These turbine blades have large RCS and occupy portions of the spatial domain and Doppler spectrum used by E2C and other Navy systems to detect/track critical targets. The UD/UD team proposes to design, evaluate and demonstrate an adjunct Wind Farm Airborne Radar Processor (WARP) for the mitigation of wind farm clutter. The innovation arises in US/UDs proposal for rule based control of training data selection in filtering and false alarm control (in the rejection of clutter). This control will span across multiple channels and Doppler filters. Another proposed innovation is the application of dynamic logic (DL) principles to the hybrid clutter canceller (HCC) described in U.S. Patent #5,061,934 [5]. The HCC will also incorporate a Knowledge Aided Extended (Discrete Time) Kalman Filter KA-EDTKF. The KA-EDTKF will be used for parameter estimation in the WARP for wind turbine backscatter prediction and cancellation with no discernable impact on target visibility.

Benefit:
Anticipated

Benefits:
The Wind Farm Airborne Radar Processor will greatly improve surveillance performance in regions surrounding the wind farms without negatively impacting performance in other regions. Performance in joint urban/littoral/wind farm regions will also be improved. Application to other Navy radars, radars from other services and FAA radars will be addressed.

Keywords:
Kalman Filtering, Kalman Filtering, Dynamic Logic, interference rejection, airborne radar, trading data selection, wind turbines, detection, tracking

Phase II

Contract Number: N68335-16-C-0075
Start Date: 12/7/2015    Completed: 12/12/2018
Phase II year
2016
Phase II Amount
$999,907
Detection and track processing in Navy AEW Radar is compounded by the rapidly increasing number of wind-farms comprised of multiple turbines. Turbine blades exhibit large reflectivity and occupy portions of the spatial/spectral domain that radar systems have to operate within in order to detect and track mission critical targets (stealthy aircraft, slow-moving drones, numerous surface targets). This mission requires the development of advanced interference-rejection, detection and track processing algorithms. The improved performance of these algorithms comes at a cost - the requirement to better understand all sources of interference. Upstate Scientific proposes to demonstrate an innovative and minimally intrusive Wind-farm Airborne Radar Processor (WARP), to be used for the mitigation of clutter created by the aforementioned wind-farms. The innovation arises in the selection of training data in spatial-temporal filtering, false alarm control, and track processing for the rejection of wind-farm caused clutter and the detection and track processing of targets.

Benefit:
The innovative signal processing techniques for improved wind turbine interference rejection and target detection proposed in WARP operate transparently to the fielded radar system. All that the WARP requires is digital data that can be

Keywords:
Airborne Radar Wind Turbine Clutter Mitigation, Minimum Discernable Velocity, Adaptive Processing, Target Signal Preservation, Multi-Target Track Processing, Target Probability of Detection, Sub-Clutter Visibility, Airborne Radar Constant False Alarm Rate