Abstract
Survey results have shown that many respondents report to be annoyed by vibration, which they attribute to a wind farm. The aim of this work is to explore wind turbine vibration characteristics and evaluate its effects on humans. The vibration was measured on a bed frame, the floor and a window in three dwellings located 3.3, 5 and 2.4 km from two wind farms in South Australia. It was found that vibration on the window was wind farm related as it contained amplitude modulation. Vibration on the bed and floor was low and dominated by ambient vibration. Evaluation based on the AS 2670-2 (1990) and BS 6472-1 (2008) standards indicated that the vibration levels on the floor are unlikely to cause discomfort or adverse comment. Also, vibration can be associated with local wind speed and low-frequency noise meaning that wind-induced structural vibration could be erroneously attributed to a wind farm.
Highlights
There are many benefits to renewable energy, which include reduced greenhouse emissions, improved air quality and avoiding the depletion of natural resources for future generations
This study presented an exploratory analysis of the wind farm vibration measured inside dwellings located near wind farm
Measured vibration signals can correlate well with the local wind speed and wind farm power output, narrowband frequency analysis of signals measured on the bed frame and floor revealed no characteristics associated with wind farms
Summary
There are many benefits to renewable energy, which include reduced greenhouse emissions, improved air quality and avoiding the depletion of natural resources for future generations. Despite these clear benefits, the rapid expansion of wind energy has resulted in widespread community complaints regarding noise and vibration emission.[1,2,3,4,5] In a survey conducted by Møller and Lydolf[6] in Denmark on 189 annoyed persons, the authors found that many residents have a ‘feeling’ of vibrations, either in their body (43.9%) or through objects around them (28.8%). Both studies found that vibration signals produced by the operating wind turbines
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