IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/renene/v50y2013icp1044-1052.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Effect of blade flutter and electrical loading on small wind turbine noise

Author

Listed:
  • Vick, Brian
  • Broneske, Sylvia

Abstract

The effect of blade flutter and electrical loading on the sound level of two different size wind turbines was investigated at the Conservation and Production Research Laboratory near Bushland, TX. Data were collected on two blade designs tested on a wind turbine rated at 1 kW, and there also was a third blade tested on an improved version of the same wind turbine. The 1 kW wind turbines were used for off-grid water pumping. If the 1 kW wind turbines were electrically loaded, the start of blade flutter was delayed from 700 to 900 rpm when the blade length was reduced 9.2%, and no blade flutter occurred when the shorter fiberglass blades were stiffened. However, if there was no electrical load (e.g. offline), the shorter stiffer blades would start to flutter at 1050 rpm. For the 10 kW wind turbine, two blade designs were tested for off-grid water pumping, and a third blade design was tested on a utility grid-tie system. The original blades fluttered when the 10 kW off-grid wind turbine was offline at a rotor speed of 260 rpm, but the second blade design (different airfoil) appeared to never flutter at any rotor speed when offline. For the 10 kW wind turbine, the sound emission of the second blade design was approximately the same as that of the third blade design – both had lower sound emissions than the original blade design. Blade flutter increased the average sound power level on the 1 kW wind turbine 15–20 dB and on the 10 kW wind turbine 5–7 dB. A procedure was developed which allowed the best blade design for sound emission to be identified even though the microphone measurement position varied (due to different tower heights) and electrical loading was different (on-grid, off-grid, or offline). This paper should be of help to design engineers interested in designing wind turbines with a lower sound emission, and test engineers collecting and analyzing sound level data of existing wind turbines. This paper may also help in the validation of computer codes that are used to predict whether blade flutter will occur on large MW size wind turbines.

Suggested Citation

  • Vick, Brian & Broneske, Sylvia, 2013. "Effect of blade flutter and electrical loading on small wind turbine noise," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 1044-1052.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:50:y:2013:i:c:p:1044-1052
    DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2012.08.057
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148112005277
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.renene.2012.08.057?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rogers, T. & Omer, S., 2012. "The effect of turbulence on noise emissions from a micro-scale horizontal axis wind turbine," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 180-184.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anicic, Obrad & Petković, Dalibor & Cvetkovic, Slavica, 2016. "Evaluation of wind turbine noise by soft computing methodologies: A comparative study," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1122-1128.
    2. Rocha, P. A. Costa & Rocha, H. H. Barbosa & Carneiro, F. O. Moura & da Silva, M. E. Vieira & de Andrade, C. Freitas, 2016. "A case study on the calibration of the k–ω SST (shear stress transport) turbulence model for small scale wind turbines designed with cambered and symmetrical airfoils," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 144-150.
    3. Tang, Jialin & Soua, Slim & Mares, Cristinel & Gan, Tat-Hean, 2016. "An experimental study of acoustic emission methodology for in service condition monitoring of wind turbine blades," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 99(C), pages 170-179.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liu, W.Y., 2017. "A review on wind turbine noise mechanism and de-noising techniques," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 108(C), pages 311-320.
    2. Su, Jie & Lei, Hang & Zhou, Dai & Han, Zhaolong & Bao, Yan & Zhu, Hongbo & Zhou, Lei, 2019. "Aerodynamic noise assessment for a vertical axis wind turbine using Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 559-569.
    3. Mohamed, M.H., 2014. "Aero-acoustics noise evaluation of H-rotor Darrieus wind turbines," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 596-604.
    4. Tummala, Abhishiktha & Velamati, Ratna Kishore & Sinha, Dipankur Kumar & Indraja, V. & Krishna, V. Hari, 2016. "A review on small scale wind turbines," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1351-1371.
    5. Anicic, Obrad & Petković, Dalibor & Cvetkovic, Slavica, 2016. "Evaluation of wind turbine noise by soft computing methodologies: A comparative study," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1122-1128.
    6. Mohamed, M.H., 2016. "Reduction of the generated aero-acoustics noise of a vertical axis wind turbine using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) techniques," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 531-544.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:50:y:2013:i:c:p:1044-1052. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/renewable-energy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.