Bison_

Harmonising safety and nature. To ensure night-time airspace safety, wind turbines must be labelled with a flashing red light, known as a beacon. This allows an approaching aircraft to recognise the turbines and react accordingly.

However, in order to prevent the lighting from being active even though there is no aircraft in the vicinity, on-demand night-time marking of aviation obstacles can be used via transponder signals (BNK for short). This protects residents and the environment from light pollution and complies with all safety requirements. Lanthan Safe Sky from Walldorf has developed just such a system.

A receiver unit is installed in a park with on-demand night-time labelling that receives signals from the aircraft and transmits them to the Lanthan Safe Sky servers. The server processes the signals and controls the labelling. The connection between the receiver unit in the wind farm and the server is ensured via the mobile internet. As wind farms are often located in remote rural areas, constant network coverage is not always guaranteed. However, a wind farm covers a large area, so there are areas with both poorer and better internet reception - they just need to be found.

Tristan from the development team on the project: ‘The successful completion of the app was the result of several weeks of intensive development and a well thought-out test phase. The team overcame exciting and challenging aspects to achieve the set goals and present a fast solution with good functionality.’

Bison is an Android app developed by us that measures and collects signal strengths in wind farms. Before installing the BNK system in the wind farm, Bison measures the signal strengths of different providers over a period of one to two weeks. The readings are recorded every 15 minutes, linked to location data and uploaded to Google Pub/Sub . If there is no internet connection, the data is stored locally on the smartphone and uploaded as soon as a connection is restored.

By analyzing the measurement data, the ideal location for the BNK system can be determined.