DETERMINATION OF SURFACE ROUGHNESS PARAMETER THROUGH AERIAL IMAGES IN WIND POWER PLANT INSTALLATION

Abstract

The surface roughness parameter is an important parameter in the installation of a wind energy power plant and it varies depending on the dimensions and the distribution of the roughness elements on the land. Before the installation roughness maps indicate roughness of the surface has to be drawn. In today's applications, these maps are drawn approximately by WAsP software using the information obtained from the terrestrial observations belongs to experts. But this application is costly and time consuming and the assessment is based on limited land observations. In this study the surface roughness parameter is determined by digital image processing techniques from the digital images taken over aerial field. Thus it gives the opportunity to consider whole power plant surface into account with lower cost and time requirements over the traditional methods. Images used in the study are obtained from the Map General Command and MATLAB software platform is used. The study is based on the determination of the closure rates on the land by image segmentation method such as OTSU algorithm, fuzzy c-means and k-means algorithms. In order to evaluate the consistency of the results images are evaluated with ERDAS software. Obtained results showed the effectiveness of the study.