Environmental noise control during its transmission phase to protect buildings. Design model for acoustic barriers based on arrays of isolated scatterers

Publication date: November 2015
Source:Building and Environment, Volume 93, Part 2
Author(s): Sergio Castiñeira-Ibañez, Constanza Rubio, Juan Vicente Sánchez-Pérez
A new generation of acoustic barriers is being introduced into the noise control market. These barriers, based on arrays of isolated scatterers, present interesting properties to be used in cities to reduce the transmitted transport noise affecting buildings. Among them, both aesthetic and continuity factors of the urban landscape may be mentioned. This new kind of barrier is technologically advanced and acoustically competitive with respect to the current ones formed by continuous rigid materials. To design these barriers whilst taking into account their inherent acoustic complexity, we present an overlapping numerical model here that enables us to split the real three-dimensional problem into two two-dimensional ones, allowing both the reduction of the computational cost and the separate analysis of each one of the noise control mechanisms involved. We analyse different cases, checking the numerical simulations with accurate experimental results.