Abstract
The growing demand for renewable energy supply stimulates a drastic increase in the deployment rate of offshore wind energy. Offshore wind power generators are usually supported by large foundation piles that are driven into the seabed with hydraulic impact hammers or vibratory devices. The pile installation process, which is key to the construction of every new wind farm, is hindered by a serious by-product: the underwater noise pollution. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art computational methods to predict the underwater noise emission by the installation of foundation piles offshore including the available noise mitigation strategies. Future challenges in the field are identified under the prism of the ever-increasing size of wind turbines and the emerging pile driving technologies.
Highlights
Driven by the ambitious climate goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the demand for energy generated by wind turbines increased in the past decades [1,2,3,4,5,6]
In the TUHH model (Hamburg University of Technology, Germany), the close-range noise field is predicted by a FE model in ABAQUS [154] and the resulting field is subsequently used as input to an in-house developed wavenumber integration (WI) algorithm for the far-range noise prediction [94,155]
Range- and angular-dependent environments can be included within the all-fluid model approximation in the long-range module
Summary
Driven by the ambitious climate goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the demand for energy generated by wind turbines increased in the past decades [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The characteristics of the radiated wave field relate strongly to the method of installation, the pile size and the local site conditions [19] These elements are key to understanding the noise pollution and the uncertainty in the propagation of the sound field at large distances [20]. Each strike of the hydraulic hammer generates strong impulsive sound waves in the seawater which propagate at large distance from the construction site [25,26,27,28,29]. The underwater sound emission when piles are installed with vibratory devices is less thoroughly explored The reasons for this are, most likely, attributed to the fact that noise is less severe when compared to impact piling and vibratory methods of installation are less frequently applied offshore.
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