Machine learning-based tools for wind turbine acoustic monitoring

The identification and separation of sound sources has always been a difficult problem for acoustic technicians to tackle. This is due to the considerable complexity of a sound that is made up of many contributions at different frequencies. Each sound has a specific frequency spectrum, but when many sounds overlap it becomes difficult to discriminate between the different contributions. In this case, it can be extremely useful to have a tool that is capable of identifying the operating conditions of an acoustic source. In this study, measurements were made of the noise emitted by a wind turbine in the vicinity of a sensitive receptor. To identify the operating conditions of the wind turbine, average spectral levels in one-third octave bands were used. A model based on a support vector machine (SVM) was developed for the detection of the operating conditions of the wind turbine; then a model based on an artificial neural network was used to compare the performance of both models. The high precision returned by the simulation models supports the adoption of these tools as a support for the acoustic characterization of noise in environments close to wind turbines.