Extending standard urban outdoor noise propagation models to complex geometries

A hybrid method that combines a noise engineering method and the 2.5D boundary element method approximates outdoor sound propagation in large domains with complex objects more accurately than noise engineering methods alone and more efficiently than reference methods alone. Noise engineering methods (e.g., ISO 9613-2 or CNOSSOS-EU) efficiently approximate sound levels from roads, railways, and industrial sources in cities for simple, box-shaped geometries by first finding the propagation paths between the source and receiver, then applying attenuations (e.g., geometrical divergence and atmospheric absorption) to each path, and finally incoherently summing all of the path contributions. Standard engineering methods cannot model more complicated geometries but introducing an additional attenuation term quantifies the influence of complex objects. Calculating this extra attenuation term requires reference calculations but performing reference computations for each path is too computationally expensive. Thus, the extra attenuation term is linearly interpolated from a data table containing the corrections for many source/receiver positions and frequencies. The 2.5D boundary element method produces the levels for the real and simplified geometries and subtracting them yields a table of corrections. For a T-shaped barrier with two buildings, this approach reduces the mean error by approximately 2 dBA compared to a standard engineering method.