The journal of the European Acoustics Association (EAA), Acta Acustica United with Acoustics, has just accepted the paper titled: “Numerical investigation of the effect of crosswind on sound propagation outdoors”, by Maarten Hornikx and Timothy van Renterghem. In the paper, we show that the effect of wind on noise propagation from a line source (like a highway) is not only unfavourable when the wind blows from line source to a certain receiver location, but also in crosswind conditions.
This is the abstract:
The effect of wind on sound propagation in the atmosphere has been studied extensively before with an emphasize on downwind sound propagation, typically representing worst-case scenarios. However, the influence of oblique and crosswind on propagation from various types of sources raises some questions in acoustic literature. In this work, the effect of a logarithmic wind speed profile at different wind directions has been studied for sound emitted by a point source, a coherent line source and an incoherent line source. For this purpose, a full three-dimensional wave-based method was used. For the incoherent line source simulation, the Harmonoise engineering approach based on a summation of source segments was considered as well and shows to be in satisfying agreement with the latter. While for a point source and coherent line source crosswind shows to have an insignificant effect, it is important in case of an incoherent line source. Also, the stretch of the incoherent line source contributing to the noise level at a receiver close to this line differs strongly depending on the wind direction.
Building Acoustics TU/e 