Contribution of Small Wind Turbine Structural Vibration to Noise Emission

Ehsan Mollasalehi, Qiao Sun and David Wood
Additional contact information
Ehsan Mollasalehi: Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, T2N 1N4, Canada
Qiao Sun: Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, T2N 1N4, Canada
David Wood: Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, T2N 1N4, Canada

Energies, 2013, vol. 6, issue 8, 1-23

Abstract: A major barrier to the acceptance of small wind turbines is that they are perceived to be noisy. This paper investigates an aspect of noise emission that has not been considered; vibration and noise generation from the tower. First, vibration measurements were made using accelerometers placed on the 10.2 m monopole tower of a Skystream 2.4 kW wind turbine, and natural frequencies and corresponding deflection shapes were calculated. Second, the results from the survey were used to verify the predictions of a finite element model of the tower structure. Lastly, the tower’s acoustic emission was simulated computationally, as it was not possible to measure it accurately. Most vibration energy occurred in the very low frequency band (?10 Hz). It was found that wind itself can only excite the first two bending modes. On the other hand, emitted noise from the tower at large distances can be neglected, as close to the tower, the noise can reach 30 dB.

Keywords: small wind turbine; wind turbine noise; tower vibration; operational modal analysis; noise propagation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/6/8/3669/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/6/8/3669/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:6:y:2013:i:8:p:3669-3691:d:27497

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().