TremAc Project To Study Noise And Vibrations From Wind Turbines
With wind energy growing in popularity and share in Europe, a new project has set out to discover the impact of wind and vibrations from wind turbines.
The South-German WindForS research cluster, comprising seven universities and research institutions from Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in Germany, has initiated the TremAc project, short for Objective Criteria for Vibration and Noise Emissions of Inland Wind Power Plants cooperation project. Funded by the Germany Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the TremAc project intends to study how wind turbines produce noise and vibrations, how they are related, and how they can be better foreseen and reduced. The project will aim to improve the planning, development, and acceptance of wind power plants, while developing objective criteria for the sound and vibration emissions.
“We want to compute the complete chain of effects from the plant to the population,” said Theodoros Triantafyllidis, coordinator of the TremAc cooperation project and Head of the Institute of Soil Mechanics and Rock Mechanics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Researchers will study the interaction of acoustic and seismic vibrations of wind power plants, and develop a model to compute both emissions. The researchers will measure acoustic signals in the atmosphere, and seismic signals in the ground, for both a single wind turbine and for an entire wind farm. The neighbouring communities will also be intreviewed using environmental medicine and psychological questionnaires.
Therefore, the researchers will be able to compare objective observations from the wind turbines with human subjective observations. According to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the study of emission and perception of noise and vibrations has been conducted separately, in most cases. “This is far too limited in scope to understand why neighbors complain of inconveniences caused by wind power plants even though the required limit values are observed and people should not hear anything physiologically,” said Triantafyllidis, explaining why the interaction between subjective and objective is so important.
More information about the TremAc project can be found here.
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