Citation

Zhang J, Schomer PD, Li Q, Chen F, Zhou X, Han X. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 2012; 131(4): 3342.

Affiliation

Zhejiang Research & Design Institute of Environmental Protection, 109 Tian Mu Shan Road, Hangzhou 310007, China; State Key Lab. of Subtropical Building Science, South China University of Technology, China, jpzhang@mail.hz.zj.cn.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, American Institute of Physics)

DOI

10.1121/1.4708512

PMID

22501725

Abstract

A highway composed of surface and elevated sections opened with very little traffic and without noise barriers along the elevated sections to help meet the relatively stringent noise control targets. However, some noise control measures that were added to the basic design included increased height to the guard barrier, low noise road surface pavement, and green buffer zones. Now authorities wish to determine the traffic flow conditions for which noise barriers would be required on the elevated sections. Of course this result can be determined by iteratively stepping through the variables, but this would take great effort. This paper presents a semi-theoretical semi-empirical method that simplifies the problem. Let K be the difference between noise from surface and elevated sections of the road. The noise level is calculated for the surface sections including such factors as speed, percent buses, percent of traffic at night, and other noise related factors from transportation engineering. Then, the noise level of the elevated sections is estimated from the levels calculated for the surface sections added to K. This estimated level is compared to the noise limit, and from this one can establish the traffic flow which would require noise barriers on the elevated sections.

Language: en