Environmental Acoustics

Improving Quality of Life

The Building Acoustics group has a focal area of research on outdoor acoustics to help society tackling the adverse health effects associated to environmental noise and improving quality of life in outdoor spaces.

Quantifying Sound Propagation

A main problem is the reduction of low frequency sound, and the effects on outdoor sound propagation should be quantified: atmospheric scattering and refraction (due to mean wind and turbulence), ground and object reflections and diffraction. Numerical tools for the computation of sound propagation outdoors are developed, validated and compared with field measurements. The tools can be used to propose noise mitigation measures and prepare signals to be used for virtual acoustics.

Method and Applications

The main numerical tools developed in the group to compute sound propagation outdoors are the pseudospectral time domain (PSTD), the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, the hybrid Fourier PSTD/DG and the diffusion equation (DE). The methods have been used to amongst others quantify the wind effect on sound propagation towards urban areas, and to compute aircraft noise from runways to the urban environment.