Noise mitigation with balloon arrays during pile driving activities in the underwater environment

The high low-frequency sound pressure level generated by pile driving activities of offshore wind farms is harmful to marine life. Thus, it is important to devise a noise mitigation method to minimize the noise impact in the marine environment. We propose to deploy balloon arrays with existing marine structure of pile driving activities to reduce the noise impact region defined by the PTS/TTS bound of marine mammals during the offshore operation. The effectiveness of noise reduction is verified in the tank experiment. The field test would be done in the Spring as the piling program of offshore windfarm in Taiwan would be executed on schedule. It would prove the effectiveness of noise reduction with the deployment of balloon arrays. This work is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Republic of China (under Project#: MOST 103-3113-E-002-002-CC2). © 2015 IEEE.