Wind turbine, an efficient way to sustainably generate electricity, of which the noise problem would affect the living environment adversely. This paper presents the results of the aerodynamic and aero-acoustic calculation of a vertical axis wind turbine. The IDDES technique and FW-H acoustic analogy are adopted to conduct all simulations. The results indicate that the combination of thickness and loading noise are the dominant noise sources at tonal peak frequency, and quadrupole noise has negligible influence. Rotational speed and receiver distance will significantly affect noise level. This work can be exploited to design quieter vertical axis wind turbines.
In recent years, the demands of renewable energy have attracted more public attention. As a clean and sustainable renewable energy, offshore wind energy has been utilized by wind turbines to generate electricity. However, one offensive problem, noise pollution, would affect the living environment of nearby creatures. Especially in several offshore wind turbine farms, birds and other animals, have left for new habitats. Therefore, it is an important issue to simulate and evaluate wind turbine noise.
According to the direction of rotation, wind turbines can be divided into two major categories: horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT) and vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) (Borg, Collu and Brennan, 2012). Since the wind turbines require further performance optimization to be competitive with other energy devices, the geometrical design, aerodynamic performance and optimal solutions are continuing to be investigated. Bae et al. (Y.H. Bae, M.H. Kim and H.C. Kim, 2017) studied a floating offshore wind turbine with broken mooring line. The power production and structural fatigue life were checked respectively, and some risk assessments were conducted. Rezaeiha et al. (Rezaeiha, Kalkman and Blocken, 2017) conducted researches on the effects of pitch angle on power performance and aerodynamics of a vertical axis wind turbine. A 6.6% increase in power coefficient could be achieved using a pitch angle of 2 degree at a tip speed ratio of 4 was shown in the results. MirHassani and Yarahmadi (MirHassani and Yarahmadi, 2017) investigated the wind farm layout optimization under uncertainty. A mixed integer quadratic optimization model is developed based on the interaction matrix for multi-turbine wake effects considering different hub height wind turbines. Compared to the conventional HAWTs, the VAWTs show many superiorities, including universal wind exposure, relatively simple blade structure, lower maintenance costs and lesser aerodynamic noise (Tjiu, Marnoto, Mat, Ruslan and Sopian, 2015).Although the noise generated by VAWT is lesser than that caused by HAWT, VAWT's noise is not negligible. Noise generated by operating wind turbines can be divided into mechanical noise and aerodynamic noise. Mechanical noise is generated by different machinery parts. Aerodynamic noise is produced from the moving blades and is mainly associated with the interaction of turbulence with the blade surface (Ghasemian, Ashrafi, and Sedaghat, 2017). Mechanical noise can be decreased by some engineering methods, while the reduction of aerodynamic noise is still a problem.
