09:00 - 10:30 Noise and visual impacts and you as the local resident
Environmental impacts & social acceptance
Room: C 2.2
This session will explore various technologies and methodologies to analyse and mitigate noise and visual impacts of wind farms. It will focus in particular on the capacity of the various technologies to foster acceptance among citizens living around a wind farm. Preventing negative impacts of wind farms on people means reducing noise and visual impact.
Chair and speakers will involve the audience by discussing the various examples of projects using these technologies. With the help of these examples, we will try to find out why certain technologies help to foster acceptance while others do not.
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Learning objectives
- Apply two new methodologies when analysing visual impact;
- Consider application of three approaches when analysing noise impacts;
- Explain ways of reducing noise and visual impact;
- Distinguish effective and less effective technologies for various kinds of wind power projects.
Presenter
Co-authors:
Michael Kerscher (1) F Benjamin Vonrhein (1) Dr. Dagmar Rokita (2) Prof. Dr. Friedrich Ueberle (2)
(1) gfai tech GmbH, Berlin, Germany (2) HAW Hochschule fuer Angewandte Wissenschaften, Hamburg, Germany
Presenter's biography
Biographies are supplied directly by presenters at WindEurope Summit 2016 and are published here uneditedMr Michael Kerscher has been an expert in acoustic engineering since many years and at the moment he is working for the gfai tech GmbH in Berlin as acoustic and measurement engineer. He studied Audio Engineering at the Technical University of Graz, Austria. The main focus of his current work lies on measurements with the Acoustic Camera, a device to localize sound sources. Recently he supports the HAW Hamburg with the acoustic evaluation of wind power plants and wind parks with the goal of decreasing noise emissions and increasing the public acceptance of such facilities.
Abstract
How acoustic camera measurements can help to increase the acceptance of wind turbines
Introduction
This paper explains the basic properties and functionalities of source localization using beamforming and the Acoustic Camera. Several practical applications on wind turbines will be presented and show the efficiency and robustness of the method in the field of wind energy acoustics with the major goal of reducing environmental noise.
Approach
Acoustic measurements become more and more significant in the field of environmental engineering and the design and evaluation of wind energy plants. A very powerful and comprehensive tool is a measurement with the Acoustic Camera, a special multichannel array of measurement microphones. Applying beamforming algorithms it is possible to localize sound sources.
By calculating and compensating the time delays between the sound sources and all the individual microphones and summing up their levels, the sound pressure for individual source locations can be calculated and be depicted in an acoustic map: Sound becomes visible!
Main body of abstract
This method can be used in any scientific or engineering field, where acoustic properties are of interest. Wind turbines produce noise at various source locations, e.g. the blades, gears, brakes etc. Besides many other aspects it is of utmost importance to reduce the emitted sound power to increase the public acceptance of wind turbines. The Acoustic Camera can contribute to this goal in an outstanding way by identifying the major source locations from a remote position. Thus it is possible to measure, evaluate and map the sound emission of individual turbines in existing wind parks, even in the presence of secondary noise sources like nearby roads etc.
The Acoustic Camera can also help engineers, researchers, scientists and draftsmen with the improvement of individual parts of the plant during the design and development phase of new facilities. Only this way the entity of all individual sound contributors can be taken into account and the overall sound emission can be decreased. Furthermore the Acoustic Camera has potential to detect external and internal damages from distant measurements and therefore support the maintenance process and the reduction of maintenance costs of existing plants.
Conclusion
This study combines measurement and scientific expertise. It is the basis of future work e.g. in the form of a database of environmental noises, which can help residents of planned wind power plants gaining a higher acceptance and lower noise emissions.
Learning objectives
The main goal of measurements with the Acoustic Camera on wind power plants is to understand their acoustic emissions. This helps in various fields such as development, maintenance, monitoring and public relations with the aim of obtaining high operational safety and reliability, low noise emissions and high public acceptance.
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