A Review of the Possible Perceptual and Physiological Effects of Wind Turbine Noise.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Carlile S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6081752 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan-Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
A Review of the Possible Perceptual and Physiological Effects of Wind Turbine Noise.
Carlile Simon S Davy John L JL Hillman David D Burgemeister Kym K
Trends in hearing 20180101
This review considers the nature of the sound generated by wind turbines focusing on the low-frequency sound (LF) and infrasound (IS) to understand the usefulness of the sound measures where people work and sleep. A second focus concerns the evidence for mechanisms of physiological transduction of LF/IS or the evidence for somatic effects of LF/IS. While the current evidence does not conclusively demonstrate transduction, it does present a strong prima facia case. There are substantial outstandi ...[more]
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Project description:BackgroundWind turbine noise exposure and suspected health-related effects thereof have attracted substantial attention. Various symptoms such as sleep-related problems, headache, tinnitus and vertigo have been described by subjects suspected of having been exposed to wind turbine noise.ObjectiveThis review was conducted systematically with the purpose of identifying any reported associations between wind turbine noise exposure and suspected health-related effects.Data sourcesA search of the scientific literature concerning the health-related effects of wind turbine noise was conducted on PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar and various other Internet sources.Study eligibility criteriaAll studies investigating suspected health-related outcomes associated with wind turbine noise exposure were included.ResultsWind turbines emit noise, including low-frequency noise, which decreases incrementally with increases in distance from the wind turbines. Likewise, evidence of a dose-response relationship between wind turbine noise linked to noise annoyance, sleep disturbance and possibly even psychological distress was present in the literature. Currently, there is no further existing statistically-significant evidence indicating any association between wind turbine noise exposure and tinnitus, hearing loss, vertigo or headache.LimitationsSelection bias and information bias of differing magnitudes were found to be present in all current studies investigating wind turbine noise exposure and adverse health effects. Only articles published in English, German or Scandinavian languages were reviewed.ConclusionsExposure to wind turbines does seem to increase the risk of annoyance and self-reported sleep disturbance in a dose-response relationship. There appears, though, to be a tolerable level of around LAeq of 35 dB. Of the many other claimed health effects of wind turbine noise exposure reported in the literature, however, no conclusive evidence could be found. Future studies should focus on investigations aimed at objectively demonstrating whether or not measureable health-related outcomes can be proven to fluctuate depending on exposure to wind turbines.
| S-EPMC4256253 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Study objectivesTo investigate the association between self-reported and objective measures of sleep and wind turbine noise (WTN) exposure.MethodsThe Community Noise and Health Study, a cross-sectional epidemiological study, included an in-house computer-assisted interview and sleep pattern monitoring over a 7 d period. Outdoor WTN levels were calculated following international standards for conditions that typically approximate the highest long-term average levels at each dwelling. Study data were collected between May and September 2013 from adults, aged 18-79 y (606 males, 632 females) randomly selected from each household and living between 0.25 and 11.22 kilometers from operational wind turbines in two Canadian provinces. Self-reported sleep quality over the past 30 d was assessed using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Additional questions assessed the prevalence of diagnosed sleep disorders and the magnitude of sleep disturbance over the previous year. Objective measures for sleep latency, sleep efficiency, total sleep time, rate of awakening bouts, and wake duration after sleep onset were recorded using the wrist worn Actiwatch2® from a subsample of 654 participants (289 males, 365 females) for a total of 3,772 sleep nights.ResultsParticipant response rate for the interview was 78.9%. Outdoor WTN levels reached 46 dB(A) with an arithmetic mean of 35.6 and a standard deviation of 7.4. Self-reported and objectively measured sleep outcomes consistently revealed no apparent pattern or statistically significant relationship to WTN levels. However, sleep was significantly influenced by other factors, including, but not limited to, the use of sleep medication, other health conditions (including sleep disorders), caffeine consumption, and annoyance with blinking lights on wind turbines.ConclusionsStudy results do not support an association between exposure to outdoor WTN up to 46 dB(A) and an increase in the prevalence of disturbed sleep. Conclusions are based on WTN levels averaged over 1 y and, in some cases, may be strengthened with an analysis that examines sleep quality in relation to WTN levels calculated during the precise sleep period time.
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Project description:The number of onshore wind turbines in Europe has greatly increased over recent years, a trend which can be expected to continue. However, the effects of wind turbine noise on long-term health outcomes for residents living near wind farms is largely unknown, although sleep disturbance may be a cause for particular concern. Presented here are two pilot studies with the aim of examining the acoustical properties of wind turbine noise that might be of special relevance regarding effects on sleep. In both pilots, six participants spent five consecutive nights in a sound environment laboratory. During three of the nights, participants were exposed to wind turbine noise with variations in sound pressure level, amplitude modulation strength and frequency, spectral content, turbine rotational frequency and beating behaviour. The impact of noise on sleep was measured using polysomnography and questionnaires. During nights with wind turbine noise there was more frequent awakening, less deep sleep, less continuous N2 sleep and increased subjective disturbance compared to control nights. The findings indicated that amplitude modulation strength, spectral frequency and the presence of strong beats might be of particular importance for adverse sleep effects. The findings will be used in the development of experimental exposures for use in future, larger studies.
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Project description:Wind turbine noise is one of the major obstacles for the widespread use of wind energy. Noise tone can greatly increase the annoyance factor and the negative impact on human health. Noise annoyance caused by wind turbines has become an emerging problem in recent years, due to the rapid increase in number of wind turbines, triggered by sustainable energy goals set forward at the national and international level. Up to now, not all aspects of the generation, propagation and perception of wind turbine noise are well understood. For a modern large wind turbine, aerodynamic noise from the blades is generally considered to be the dominant noise source, provided that mechanical noise is adequately eliminated. The sources of aerodynamic noise can be divided into tonal noise, inflow turbulence noise, and airfoil self-noise. Many analytical and experimental acoustical studies performed the wind turbines. Since the wind turbine noise level analyzing by numerical methods or computational fluid dynamics (CFD) could be very challenging and time consuming, soft computing techniques are preferred. To estimate noise level of wind turbine, this paper constructed a process which simulates the wind turbine noise levels in regard to wind speed and sound frequency with adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). This intelligent estimator is implemented using Matlab/Simulink and the performances are investigated. The simulation results presented in this paper show the effectiveness of the developed method.
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Project description:We investigated connections between the physiology of rat barrel cortex neurons and the sensation of vibration in humans. One set of experiments measured neuronal responses in anesthetized rats to trains of whisker deflections, each train characterized either by constant amplitude across all deflections or by variable amplitude ("amplitude noise"). Firing rate and firing synchrony were, on average, boosted by the presence of noise. However, neurons were not uniform in their responses to noise. Barrel cortex neurons have been categorized as regular-spiking units (putative excitatory neurons) and fast-spiking units (putative inhibitory neurons). Among regular-spiking units, amplitude noise caused a higher firing rate and increased cross-neuron synchrony. Among fast-spiking units, noise had the opposite effect: It led to a lower firing rate and decreased cross-neuron synchrony. This finding suggests that amplitude noise affects the interaction between inhibitory and excitatory neurons. From these physiological effects, we expected that noise would lead to an increase in the perceived intensity of a vibration. We tested this notion using psychophysical measurements in humans. As predicted, subjects overestimated the intensity of noisy vibrations. Thus the physiological mechanisms present in barrel cortex also appear to be at work in the human tactile system, where they affect vibration perception.
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Project description:Assess the physiologic and self-reported effects of wind turbine noise (WTN) on sleep. Laboratory sleep study (n = 50 participants: n = 24 living close to wind turbines and n = 26 as a reference group) using polysomnography, electrocardiography, salivary cortisol, and questionnaire endpoints. Three consecutive nights (23:00-07:00): one habituation followed by a randomized quiet Control and an intervention night with synthesized 32 dB LAEq WTN. Noise in WTN nights simulated closed and ajar windows and low and high amplitude modulation depth. There was a longer rapid eye movement (REM) sleep latency (+16.8 min) and lower amount of REM sleep (-11.1 min, -2.2%) in WTN nights. Other measures of objective sleep did not differ significantly between nights, including key indicators of sleep disturbance (sleep efficiency: Control 86.6%, WTN 84.2%; wakefulness after sleep onset: Control 45.2 min, WTN 52.3 min; awakenings: Control n = 11.4, WTN n = 11.5) or the cortisol awakening response. Self-reported sleep was consistently rated as worse following WTN nights, and individuals living close to wind turbines had worse self-reported sleep in both the Control and WTN nights than the reference group. Amplitude-modulated continuous WTN may impact on self-assessed and some aspects of physiologic sleep. Future studies are needed to generalize these findings outside of the laboratory and should include more exposure nights and further examine possible habituation or sensitization.
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Project description:Wind turbines play an important role in the worldwide mission of producing renewable energy. The development toward integrating large-scale wind turbines in the urban environment has raised concerns over the noise impacts on urban residents. While most of the existing studies on wind turbine noise (WTN) have focused on rural settings, this paper investigates the relationship between WTN, noise perception and self-reported health of people, and controlling for background characteristics of the residents in urbanized areas. Questionnaire surveys were carried out around three suburban wind farms in the UK with 359 respondents. A-weighted sound pressure levels of WTN were predicted using noise mapping, for the most exposed façade of each dwelling of the respondent. The dose-response relationship was found between WTN and annoyance, moderated by age and degree of education. WTN was associated with some aspects of self-reported health, including raised health concerns, having headaches, nausea, and ear discomfort, but was not related to sleep disturbance directly. Noise sensitivity, attitudes to wind energy, and visibility of the wind turbines were found to significantly influence self-reported health. By employing a second variant of the questionnaire with the research aim masked, this study also addressed the focusing effects induced by the questionnaire design. The significant differences in the reported adverse health between questionnaire variants implied focusing bias among the sample who knew the research purpose. This elicited a methodological finding that should be noted in future research.
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Project description:Offshore wind farms are widely adopted by coastal countries to obtain clean and green energy; their environmental impact has gained an increasing amount of attention. Although offshore wind farm datasets are commercially available via energy industries, records of the exact spatial distribution of individual wind turbines and their construction trajectories are rather incomplete, especially at the global level. Here, we construct a global remote sensing-based offshore wind turbine (OWT) database derived from Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time-series images from 2015 to 2019. We developed a percentile-based yearly SAR image collection reduction and autoadaptive threshold algorithm in the Google Earth Engine platform to identify the spatiotemporal distribution of global OWTs. By 2019, 6,924 wind turbines were constructed in 14 coastal nations. An algorithm performance analysis and validation were performed, and the extraction accuracies exceeded 99% using an independent validation dataset. This dataset could further our understanding of the environmental impact of OWTs and support effective marine spatial planning for sustainable development.
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