A waveguide finite element and boundary element approach to calculating the sound radiated by railway and tram rails

Nilsson, C.M., Jones, C.J.C., Thompson, D.J. and Ryue, J. (2009) A waveguide finite element and boundary element approach to calculating the sound radiated by railway and tram rails. Journal of Sound and Vibration, 321 (3-5), 813-836. (doi:10.1016/j.jsv.2008.10.027).

Abstract

Engineering methods for modelling the generation of railway rolling noise are well established. However, these necessarily involve some simplifying assumptions to calculate the sound powers radiated by the wheel and the track. For the rail, this involves using an average vibration together with a radiation efficiency determined for a two-dimensional (2D) problem. In this paper, the sound radiation from a rail is calculated using a method based on a combination of waveguide finite elements and wavenumber boundary elements. This new method allows a number of the simplifying assumptions in the established methods to be avoided. It takes advantage of the 2D geometry of a rail to provide an efficient numerical approach but nevertheless takes into account the three-dimensional nature of the vibration and sound field and the infinite extent of the rail. The approach is used to study a conventional ‘open’ rail as well as an embedded tram rail of the type used for street running. In the former case it is shown that the conventional approach gives correct results and the complexity of the new method is mostly not necessary. However, for the embedded rail it is found that it is important to take into account the radiation from several wave types in the rail and embedding material. The damping effect of the embedding material on the rail vibration is directly taken into account and, for the example shown, causes the embedded rail to radiate less sound than the open rail above about 600 Hz. The free surface of the embedding material amplifies the sound radiation at some frequencies, while at other frequencies it moves out of phase with the rail and reduces the radiation efficiency. At low frequencies the radiation from the embedded rail resembles a line monopole source which produces greater power than the ‘open’ rail which forms a line dipole

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Contributors

Author: D.J. Thompson

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