Acoustic noise generated by air power reactor in open‐air substation

Air power reactors are often used in substations for different purposes such as fault current limiter, reactive power consumption, harmonic filtering, and grounding impedance. They are also used in test laboratories for electric material testing. If the basic design is in relation with its electric duties, the design rules also include some restrictions for thermodynamics, structural dynamics, and acoustics. The full interaction between these four engineering fields is particularly important for acoustic noise produced by the reactor. This noise level is limited by international rules. The aim of this paper is to present a simple analytical method to evaluate the acoustics of such air power reactors and to compare such a method with more sophisticated numerical evaluations. Last but not least, some trends in noise control methods are described. Detailed tests results are presented for validation of the proposed method to properly evaluate the acoustics of single core reactors. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.