The noise assessment at the receivers due to wind turbines in operation is usually performed through outdoor measurements. Background noise and wind turbines noise (WTN) are related to wind speed and ...both contribute to the overall measured noise levels (environmental noise). Nevertheless, the relation between noise and wind speed is not easily predictable, especially when the wind farms are installed in hilly terrains, where the wind shear is truly remarkable. In Italy and in other countries, this kind of assessment is even more difficult to perform due to the national regulations that require to compute the difference between environmental and background noise levels with the same weather conditions. Thus, to get a reliable and approved measure of the residual noise it would be necessary to turn off the wind farm. This work suggests a technical procedure to simultaneously estimate the immission and the residual noise components measured nearby a wind farm when the residual noise is mainly generated by wind. This allows the evaluation of the noise impact produced by operational wind farms, without requiring the farm shut down. The method aims to be fairly straightforward, thus maintaining the required scientific basis to be used as an assessment procedure by consultants and public bodies.
Adopting an agnostic approach, the quality factor Q of tantala glass is drawn via in silico mechanical spectroscopy in wide ranges of temperature (10–300 K) and frequency (500MHz≤f≤1THz). At the ...highest frequencies, Q∝f^{−3}, consistent with Rayleigh sound scattering. For frequencies lower than terahertz, losses exhibit a weak power-law frequency dependence Q∝f^{−α} with α∼0.1to0.2, depending on glass preparation and temperature. Arguing the validity of the power law down to 1 kHz, we show striking agreement with the losses measured in annealed amorphous films in the whole temperature range, revealing similitude between disordered structures created by different routes (quench cooling and deposition). Our results do not support the scenario of the mechanical loss due to activated relaxation of independent two-level systems.
A new class of very low noise low-frequency force-balance accelerometers is presented. The device has been designed for advanced mirror isolation systems of interferometric gravitational wave ...detectors. The accelerometer consists of a small monolithic folded pendulum with 2 s of natural period and an in-vacuum mechanical quality factor of 3000. The folded pendulum geometry, combined with the monolithic design, allows a unique 0.01% cross-axis residual coupling. Equipped with a high-resolution capacitance position sensor, it is capable of a noise-equivalent inertial displacement of 1-nm root mean square integrated over all the frequencies above 0.01 Hz. The main features of this new accelerometer are here reviewed. New possible applications of monolithic folded pendula in geophysical instrumentation are discussed.
•Extremely slow cooling reveals density anomaly in simulated tantala.•Negative thermal expansion occurs in the metastable supercooled phase.•Effective structural equilibration is crucial for ...observing the anomaly.•First-neighbour coordination reduces on cooling across the anomalous region.
A density anomaly, i.e. a temperature region with negative thermal expansion (NTE) bounded by a density maximum and a density minimum at lower temperatures, is revealed and characterised in tantala for the first time by Molecular Dynamics simulations. The NTE region is evidenced in the metastable supercooled liquid and rather close to the glass transition. Since NTE is suppressed by poor structural equilibration, highlighting these phenomena is highly challenging due to the need for fulfilling competing constraints of slow cooling and avoidance of the crystallization. We find that the density anomaly is signalled by a decrease of the partial coordination numbers nTa,Ta and nO,O when lowering the temperature. The NTE magnitude is comparable to the ones of both stable water and solid-state materials with giant NTE.
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The mechanisms governing mechanical dissipation in amorphous tantala are studied at microscopic scale via Molecular Dynamics simulations, namely by mechanical spectroscopy in a wide ...range of temperature and frequency. We find that dissipation is associated with irreversible atomic rearrangements with a sharp cooperative character, involving tens to hundreds of atoms arranged in spatially extended clusters of polyhedra. Remarkably, at low temperature we observe an excess of plastically rearranging oxygen atoms which correlates with the experimental peak in the macroscopic mechanical losses. A detailed structural analysis reveals preferential connections of the irreversibly rearranging polyhedra, corresponding to edge and face sharing. These results might lead to microscopically informed design rules for reducing mechanical losses in relevant materials for structural, optical, and sensing applications.
We perform a statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817. Our analysis does not utilize knowledge of NGC 4993 as the unique host galaxy of the optical counterpart to GW170817. Instead, we ...consider each galaxy within the GW170817 localization region as a potential host; combining the redshifts from all of the galaxies with the distance estimate from GW170817 provides an estimate of the Hubble constant, H0. Considering all galaxies brighter than as equally likely to host a binary neutron star merger, we find km s−1 Mpc−1 (maximum a posteriori and 68.3% highest density posterior interval; assuming a flat H0 prior in the range km s−1 Mpc−1). We explore the dependence of our results on the thresholds by which galaxies are included in our sample, and we show that weighting the host galaxies by stellar mass or star formation rate provides entirely consistent results with potentially tighter constraints. By applying the method to simulated gravitational-wave events and a realistic galaxy catalog we show that, because of the small localization volume, this statistical standard siren analysis of GW170817 provides an unusually informative (top 10%) constraint. Under optimistic assumptions for galaxy completeness and redshift uncertainty, we find that dark binary neutron star measurements of H0 will converge as , where N is the number of sources. While these statistical estimates are inferior to the value from the counterpart standard siren measurement utilizing NGC 4993 as the unique host, km s−1 Mpc−1 (determined from the same publicly available data), our analysis is a proof-of-principle demonstration of the statistical approach first proposed by Bernard Schutz over 30 yr ago.
Measuring rail roughness in view of reducing rolling noise emission is a challenge for field instrumentation. Direct measurements can be carried out with contacting relative displacement measuring ...systems. However, the rail length that can be covered is limited and surveying a wide network turns out not to be practical. On the other hand, indirect methods based on acceleration measurements may be used for monitoring purposes. In this paper, the feasibility of roughness measurements based on interferometric techniques is discussed. Such a measurement could be carried out at normal train operation speed. The problems of optical measurements in real-time conditions are taken in due consideration. A key point of the discussion is the use of a system for vibration attenuation to be mounted under a vehicle to suspend the optical sensing device. The structure for a complete measurement device is proposed together with the expected performance.
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