Designing transparent sound barriers to control highways noise

Researchers of urban studies have concluded that annoying sounds as the second environmental pollution –after smoke and air pollution- has disastrous impacts on public health. Streets and highways are one of the major sources of noise pollution. In this project, based on previously conducted research, different kinds of sound barriers are studied in terms of materials and appearance, and by mentioning the disadvantages of poly-carbonate, including special acoustic and non-acoustic properties, that is introduced as a proper choice to use in sound barriers.Also, on how the use of sound barrier change and improve the rate of noise reduction, various methods of solving the problem are introduced, including failure-based methods and also wave-based method, for instance boundary element method. In all these methods, the problem can be studied in the two or three-dimensional space, however, due to costly and time-consuming problem of three-dimensional analysis, most studies, up to now, have been conducted in two-dimensional space, but compared to the three-dimensional analysis it is less accurate.Since the wave-based method is an accurate method for estimating a barrier decline and also can be easily implemented on complex geometrical shapes, it seems that it is an appropriate method for analyzing issues, such as sound barriers

Keywords:

sound barrier , noise control , noise pollution , modelling