Timothy Van Renterghem

Quantifying scattered sound energy from a single tree by means of reverberation time

Trees in urban spaces surrounded by buildings may be effective in dispersing sound energy, and this could affect sound level distribution and street canyon reverberation. To quantify this effect of trees with a view to including it in numerical predictions, this paper examines sound scattering from a single tree in open field by means of reverberation time (RT). Five trees of different species and crown sizes were considered. The influence of ground condition, receiver height, crown size and shape, foliage condition, and source-receiver angle and distance has been assessed. The results show that RT20 is proportional to the tree crown size, which is the most important factor. The maximum RT20 measured was 0.28 s at 4000 Hz for the studied trees when in leaf (with foliage). The presence of leaves increased RT20 at high frequencies, typically by 0.08 s at 4000 Hz. It was also demonstrated that the source-receiver angle can affect the characteristics of decay curves significantly. With increasing source-receiver distance within 40 m, RT20 was slightly changed. It was shown that ground condition and receiver height affect the decay curves, especially at low and mid frequencies, where sound scattering is of relatively limited importance.

Sound propagation from a ridge wind turbine across a valley

Sound propagation outdoors can be strongly affected by ground topography. The existence of hills and valleys between a source and receiver can lead to the shielding or focusing of sound waves. Such effects can result in significant variations in received sound levels. In addition, wind speed and air temperature gradients in the atmospheric boundary layer also play an important role. All of the foregoing factors can become especially important for the case of wind turbines located on a ridge overlooking a valley. Ridges are often selected for wind turbines in order to increase their energy capture potential through the wind speed-up effects often experienced in such locations. In this paper, a hybrid calculation method is presented to model such a case, relying on an analytical solution for sound diffraction around an impedance cylinder and the conformal mapping (CM) Greens function parabolic equation (GFPE) technique. The various aspects of the model have been successfully validated against alternative prediction methods. Example calculations with this hybrid analytical–CM–GFPE model show the complex sound pressure level distribution across the valley and the effect of valley ground type. The proposed method has the potential to include the effect of refraction through the inclusion of complex wind and temperature fields, although this aspect has been highly simplified in the current simulations. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Wind energy in complex terrains’.

An airborne acoustic method to reconstruct a dynamically rough flow surface

Currently, there is no airborne in situ method to reconstruct with high fidelity the instantaneous elevation of a dynamically rough surface of a turbulent flow. This work proposes a holographic method that reconstructs the elevation of a one-dimensional rough water surface from airborne acoustic pressure data. This method can be implemented practically using an array of microphones deployed over a dynamically rough surface or using a single microphone which is traversed above the surface at a speed that is much higher than the phase velocity of the roughness pattern. In this work, the theory is validated using synthetic data calculated with the Kirchhoff approximation and a finite difference time domain method over a number of measured surface roughness patterns. The proposed method is able to reconstruct the surface elevation with a sub-millimeter accuracy and over a representatively large area of the surface. Since it has been previously shown that the surface roughness pattern reflects accurately the underlying hydraulic processes in open channel flow [e.g., Horoshenkov, Nichols, Tait, and Maximov, J. Geophys. Res. 118(3), 1864-1876 (2013)], the proposed method paves the way for the development of non-invasive instrumentation for flow mapping and characterization that are based on the acoustic holography principle.

Sound propagation from a wind turbine in a hilly environment

Sound propagation in the atmospheric boundary layer can be strongly affected by vertical gradients in the wind speed and air temperature, and by atmospheric turbulence. In addition, undulating terrain will either partly shield or focus sound waves, highly impacting sound exposure levels. These aspects become especially important in case of wind turbines present on a ridge, such placement often being efficient to harvest wind energy due to the wind speeding up. In this study, sound propagating from a wind turbine, positioned at a ridge, towards receivers along a valley, is numerically simulated with the Parabolic Equation (PE) method. A combination of an analytical starting field and the conformal mapping method shows to be a useful and numerically efficient approach, overcoming some issues as identified and discussed in this work. Example calculations show the importance of the valley ground impedance for wind turbine noise exposure.