Prediction of the reverberation times and sound pressure levels in town streets.

Abstract

The current study was devoted to investigate the propagation of noise along a town street where building façades and road surfaces form a street canyon. An energy based approach was used to estimate reverberation times and the sound pressure levels due to a point source located along the town street. An image source method was developed to compute sound energy in this semienclosed space. However, the image source model can be simplified leading to the numerical solutions expressed in an integral formulation. The absorption coefficients of the boundary surfaces and the air absorption factor can be included in the present analysis. The integral can further be evaluated analytically with the sound pressure levels expressed in a closed form solution. Both outdoor full scale measurements and indoor scale model experiments were conducted and compared with the computed results. The numerical results due to the proposed formula not only agree well with the experimental measurements but were also in accord with the published data.