A procedure for calibrating the spinning ultrasonic wind sensors

•A calibration process for wind speed measured by ultrasonic anemometer is proposed.•Transducer shadow is the main source of uncertainty in static and spinning probes.•Shifting in pulse trajectory due to the rotation does not affect the measurements.•Static shadow calibration can be used for rotating probe without additional error. The accuracy of wind speed and direction measurements with spinning ultrasonic wind sensors is important than ever in today’s wind industry in which, they are usually installed on the hub of the wind turbines to measure the wind speed and direction for optimized power. In this paper, extensive wind-tunnel tests have been performed to calibrate the wind speed and direction measured by a spinning single-axis ultrasonic anemometer for both static and spinning conditions. This has been carried out with static measures at various stationary angles of transducers signal path with wind direction, and with dynamic measures in which the anemometer is rotating with various rotational speeds. The velocity measured by ultrasonic anemometer in static tests is calibrated with pitot-tube data, and the interpolation of obtained calibration coefficients is used to correct the ultrasonic velocity measured in dynamic tests. It is observed that the calibrated ultrasonic wind speed measurements in dynamic tests are in a good agreement with the reference velocity. According to the results, the ultrasonic velocity measurements in both static and dynamic tests are affected by the transducers head distortions, and the shifting in acoustic pulse trajectory due to the rotational motion does not affect the anemometer measurements. The uncertainty of the calibration process for the spinning tests was found to be about 0.3%.