Evaluating annoyance mitigation in the screening of train-induced noise and ground vibrations using a single-leaf...

External sources such as traffic and construction work cause noise and vibration in nearby buildings, potentially annoying human residents. Today, almost every fifth European is harmfully affected by traffic noise and vibration. Wave barriers placed on or embedded within the soil between the source and the receiver can mitigate the transmission of ground vibration, and the airborne noise transmission can be reduced in a similar manner with a screen acting as a noise barrier. As a novel approach, the present work explores the efficiency of combining ground vibration and noise barriers into one. To this end, numerical experiments were performed by a semi-analytic finite-element method for ground vibration and the boundary-element method for sound propagation. This involved time-harmonic analyses carried out in order to study the performance of various configurations of barriers focusing on vertical barriers rigidly attached to the ground surface or embedded into the soil. Parametric analyses were conducted on the achieved vibration and noise mitigation with different types of ground-vibration barriers and noise barriers, respectively. The combined effect of the noise and ground vibration barriers were then assessed to investigate their potential for possibly reducing the negative impact on lineside residents. The aim of this work, though, is to highlight a metric, recently developed, which reports the probability on the number of residents who could be annoyed by intrusive railway noise and vibration. It is shown that a single structural-element can target a combined reduction of around 15% probability in annoyance to vibration levels combined with a 12 dB insertion loss which amounts to a 30% reduction in probability of annoyance due to railway traffic intrusive noise.