Recent Developments in the Design and Performance of Road Traffic Noise Barriers

Abstract

This paper deals with some recent developments in the design and performance of roadside barriers that are applied as a means of controlling road traffic noise. It is a review paper that is based on the outcomes of literature and information searches undertaken for and on behalf of the Roads and Traffic Authority of NSW. Some interesting, ongoing developments in the design and performance of traffic noise barriers have been identified. In particular, three types of innovative barrier designs we re identified that appear to offer the potential for increased attenuation without the need for substantial increases in barrier height. Each of these developments is considered in some detail in the paper and recommendations are made of the possibility of pursuing them further.

Archives of Acoustics

“…And therefore, many problems pertaining to their main function have been tested, i.e. the structure and design of screens, including among others cross-section types of noise screens (Watts, Morgan, 1996), types of applied materials (Samuels, Ancich, 2001) or the phenomenon of diffraction in sound baffles Li, Wong, 2005;Min, Qiu, 2009). A lot of field studies have been also concentrated on the influence of screen edge irregularity on the dispersion of sound, and in effect on the efficiency of the screen.…”

Applications of noise barriers with a slanted flat-tip jagged cantilever for noise attenuation on a construction site

“…To solve this problem, a large number of experimental and numerical studies have been conducted to improve the efficiency of barriers (Ho et al., 1997; Shao et al., 2001), such as increasing their heights, utilizing sound absorbing materials and different edge profiles (e.g., barrier caps). The height of noise barriers could be increased (Samuels, 2001) to improve the performance, for example, increased from 2–3 m to 8 m or even higher (Guo and Pan, 1997; Kuo and Morgan, 1999; Francesco et al., 2015). However, this method is usually not practical due to aesthetic considerations, cost, safety and technical reasons (May and Osman, 1980b; Jung et al., 2011; Francesco et al., 2015).…”

“…Intuitively this would be expected, as sound levels would increase as more material was removed from the jagged barrier (Hutchins et al., 1984a). Other explanations of these differing conclusions were focused on the nature of the scale modelling processes and, in particular, how ground absorption effects were included in the experiments (Samuels, 2001).…”

“…(1997), Rosenberg and Busch-Vishiniac (1997) and Menounou et al. (1998) had investigated random edge noise barriers, with positive noise attenuations obtained especially at high frequencies (>5000 Hz) (Samuels, 2001).…”