A manifold approach to determine the noise immission from a large biomass power plant and planning its mitigation

A large biomass power plant, operating continuously 24 hours per day, is surrounded by a multisource acoustic environment including road and railway traffic, other industrial activities and residential buildings. The need to discriminate and determine the noise immission due to the power plant has required a manifold approach, described in the paper, which includes long-term monitoring of the ambient noise, beamforming measurements to identify the main noise sources in the plant area, SPL measurements around these machineries to estimate their sound power. The collected data have enabled to set-up a model of outdoor noise propagation by means of which evaluate the power plant noise immission and simulate the acoustic scenarios resulting from different noise mitigation projects. Some preliminary results of the first implemented mitigation actions will be also presented.