Following a year’s worth of work and two weeks of virtual presentations showcasing wind energy innovations from 13 competing teams, the Pennsylvania State University claimed first place overall in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) 2021 Collegiate Wind Competition (CWC).
Johns Hopkins University won second place, and California Polytechnic State University won third. Students presented to a remote panel of judges June 2–10, and the competition wrapped up with a series of virtual events on June 11.
The CWC aims to prepare students from multiple disciplines to enter the wind energy workforce by providing real-world technology experience. This year’s contest met that goal, with 173 students from a range of disciplines including engineering, economics, and architecture.
Preparing Today’s College Students for Tomorrow’s Workforce
A DOE-funded workforce development program. Since 2014, the CWC has helped college students merge academic coursework with hands-on learning, connect with industry leaders, and prepare for jobs in the wind energy workforce.
The 2021 CWC teams competed in three contests:
- The Turbine Prototype Contest. Teams designed a model wind turbine.
- The Project Development Contest. Teams developed a site plan and cost-of-energy analysis for a 100-megawatt wind farm.
- The Connection Creation Contest. In this contest, new for 2021, teams conducted outreach with the wind industry, their local communities, and local media outlets.
Each year, the competition identifies a new challenge that addresses wind industry needs and helps students broaden their skills. The 2021 challenge was to research, design, and build a turbine for deployment in uncertain, with a significant degree of unknown risks and delays. The Competition organizers developed the 2021 challenge with the variabilities of both the coronavirus pandemic and the real world in mind.
“The teams embodied this challenge as they prepared for the 2021 competition and during the event itself,” said Elise DeGeorge, competition manager: “They anticipated alternatives to shared laboratory space and in-person meetings, planned for supply chain disruptions, and used digital tools to present their work. By doing so, they learned to plan ahead, practice active risk management, and adapt quickly—essential skills for the wind industry and beyond.”
Virtual Events and New Features Enhance 2021 Competition
In addition to the team presentations, the 2021 competition featured several other online events designed to complement the competition experience. These events included an industry networking event, and a student-led poster session.
lso new for the 2021 competition was the addition of two “learn-along” teams: the University of Colorado–Boulder and the University of Wyoming. These teams were not eligible for awards but submitted many of the same deliverables and received feedback on their work from competition judges. This format allowed students from these schools to experience the competition and establish a deeper understanding of the wind industry.
Samuel has spent hundreds of hours listening to wind.
“It’s kind of soothing, actually,” said Samuel, a Green Technologies research engineer “It’s easy to forget you’re listening to data. It’s a little like white noise.”
But those sounds are anything but white noise: They are the foundation of the most comprehensive dataset on exactly how quiet modern land-based wind plants could get.
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing—and cheapest—renewable energy sources in the United States. To meet the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050, the industry must grow to between five and 10 times its current size. But while this growth could decrease carbon emissions and energy prices, and create jobs, too, it could also bring wind plants closer to residential neighborhoods.
And because modern wind farms are using new operational strategies to increase energy production—strategies that could also increase noise production—potential noise might block new projects, limiting the growth of this cost-effective source of clean energy.
Current turbines are sited far enough from homes that perceptible noise is minimal (a nearby wind plant is no louder than a refrigerator heard from another room). But today, wind plant owners and wind turbine manufacturers are using a new technique to increase the performance of wind plants as a whole: wake steering. Wakes are regions where winds slow behind a wind turbine, which can decrease energy production of downwind turbines. By yawing wind turbines—turning them to face the wind at slightly different angles—wind plant operators can steer wakes, decreasing energy production for specific turbines but increasing production for the entire wind plant. Before yawing becomes the go-to technique for plants, wind plant developers need to know if it increases (or decreases) noise.
“Given public concerns about wind turbine noise,” Samuel said, “we must understand how wake steering could impact acoustic emissions. Regulators will also need observational data to establish noise restrictions.”
To gather that data, Samuel and his colleagues strategically placed 11 microphones beneath a U.S. Department of Energy-owned 1.5-megawatt wind turbine made by General Electric. The microphones collected noise across the entire range of frequencies that humans can perceive. They also captured “full-field data,” Samuel said, to measure how noise fluctuates across a large area.
Their results were surprising.
Acoustic emission models predicted that wind turbines with yaw offsets would increase noise. But the team’s data show the opposite: Yawed operation reduced wind turbine noise.
Though the decrease is slight, any noise reduction is a win: “If you can decrease the noise production of a wind turbine, you can open new wind turbine design opportunities,” Samuel said. “For example, rotors that produce less noise could operate at a higher speed. At a higher speed, they can use a lighter gearbox to produce the same energy, decreasing the cost of a turbine.”
This was, Samuel continued, “a surprising result. But a happy one.” The data show that if a wind plant uses wake steering, it can both create more energy as a whole and potentially decrease noise at the same time.
So, why were the acoustic models so wrong? “We used the noise models to measure an entirely new problem (yawed turbines),” Samuel said, “which they weren’t originally intended to study.” That could explain why the experimental results were so surprising. It also shows the models could use another look. Future models should adapt to analyze the impacts of modern techniques that wind plant operators use to control how much energy their turbines generate.
Samuel and his team’s novel noise measurement capabilities are available in a recent technical report and an open-source, DOE-hosted dataset. His techniques can be adapted to study more noise-related questions for current and future wind farms. Researchers may soon use the team’s methods to study the acoustics of not just one turbine but an entire wind plant, offshore wind plants, highly flexible turbine blades, new turbine blade shapes, and even how hills and other landscape features might interact with nearby turbines.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for us to continue using this equipment and making more measurements,” Samuel said.
That means he might have hundreds more hours of wind to listen to very soon.
Samuel has spent hundreds of hours listening to wind.
“It’s kind of soothing, actually,” said Samuel, a Green Technologies research engineer “It’s easy to forget you’re listening to data. It’s a little like white noise.”
But those sounds are anything but white noise: They are the foundation of the most comprehensive dataset on exactly how quiet modern land-based wind plants could get.
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing—and cheapest—renewable energy sources in the United States. To meet the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050, the industry must grow to between five and 10 times its current size. But while this growth could decrease carbon emissions and energy prices, and create jobs, too, it could also bring wind plants closer to residential neighborhoods.
And because modern wind farms are using new operational strategies to increase energy production—strategies that could also increase noise production—potential noise might block new projects, limiting the growth of this cost-effective source of clean energy.
Current turbines are sited far enough from homes that perceptible noise is minimal (a nearby wind plant is no louder than a refrigerator heard from another room). But today, wind plant owners and wind turbine manufacturers are using a new technique to increase the performance of wind plants as a whole: wake steering. Wakes are regions where winds slow behind a wind turbine, which can decrease energy production of downwind turbines. By yawing wind turbines—turning them to face the wind at slightly different angles—wind plant operators can steer wakes, decreasing energy production for specific turbines but increasing production for the entire wind plant. Before yawing becomes the go-to technique for plants, wind plant developers need to know if it increases (or decreases) noise.
“Given public concerns about wind turbine noise,” Samuel said, “we must understand how wake steering could impact acoustic emissions. Regulators will also need observational data to establish noise restrictions.”
To gather that data, Samuel and his colleagues strategically placed 11 microphones beneath a U.S. Department of Energy-owned 1.5-megawatt wind turbine made by General Electric. The microphones collected noise across the entire range of frequencies that humans can perceive. They also captured “full-field data,” Samuel said, to measure how noise fluctuates across a large area.
Their results were surprising.
Acoustic emission models predicted that wind turbines with yaw offsets would increase noise. But the team’s data show the opposite: Yawed operation reduced wind turbine noise.
Though the decrease is slight, any noise reduction is a win: “If you can decrease the noise production of a wind turbine, you can open new wind turbine design opportunities,” Samuel said. “For example, rotors that produce less noise could operate at a higher speed. At a higher speed, they can use a lighter gearbox to produce the same energy, decreasing the cost of a turbine.”
This was, Samuel continued, “a surprising result. But a happy one.” The data show that if a wind plant uses wake steering, it can both create more energy as a whole and potentially decrease noise at the same time.
So, why were the acoustic models so wrong? “We used the noise models to measure an entirely new problem (yawed turbines),” Samuel said, “which they weren’t originally intended to study.” That could explain why the experimental results were so surprising. It also shows the models could use another look. Future models should adapt to analyze the impacts of modern techniques that wind plant operators use to control how much energy their turbines generate.
Samuel and his team’s novel noise measurement capabilities are available in a recent technical report and an open-source, DOE-hosted dataset. His techniques can be adapted to study more noise-related questions for current and future wind farms. Researchers may soon use the team’s methods to study the acoustics of not just one turbine but an entire wind plant, offshore wind plants, highly flexible turbine blades, new turbine blade shapes, and even how hills and other landscape features might interact with nearby turbines.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for us to continue using this equipment and making more measurements,” Samuel said.
That means he might have hundreds more hours of wind to listen to very soon.