Determination of the Wind Speed and Direction by Means of Fluidic-Domain Signal Processing

This paper presents an analytical model for a recently introduced class of 2-D directional anemometers based on fluidic structures capable of averaging the differential pressure developed by the wind across distinct diameters of the transverse cross-section of a single cylinder. In previous works, it was found that performing the average over a proper set of diameters produces a differential pressure that depends on the wind direction according to a cosine law, allowing simple direction estimation. This fact, which was not investigated in previous articles, is explained in this paper taking into account symmetry and angular spectral properties of the pressure distribution. Besides analyzing previously proposed devices, this paper introduces several new configurations, which are classified according to the type of average and number of diameters involved. Comparison of the estimated performances with the experimental results obtained in earlier works clearly shows that prototypes proposed so far were far from achieving the best theoretical accuracy, suggesting that significant improvements can be obtained by re-design of the fluidic structures.