Concrete bridge-borne low-frequency noise simulation based on train-track-bridge dynamic interaction

Both the vibration of a railway bridge under a moving train and the associated bridge-borne noise are time-varying in nature. The former is commonly predicted in the time domain to take its time-varying and nonlinear properties into account, whereas acoustic computation is generally conducted in the frequency domain to obtain steady responses. This paper presents a general procedure for obtaining various characteristics of concrete bridge-borne low-frequency noise by bridging the gap between time-domain bridge vibration computation and frequency-domain bridge-borne noise simulation. The finite element method (FEM) is first used to solve the transient train-track-bridge dynamic interaction problem, with an emphasis on the local vibration of the bridge. The boundary element method (BEM) is then applied to find the frequency-dependent modal acoustic transfer vectors (MATVs). The time-domain sound pressure is finally obtained with the help of time-frequency transforms. The proposed procedure is applied to a real urban rail transit U-shaped concrete bridge to compute the bridge acceleration arid bridge-borne noise, and these results are compared with the field measurement results. Both sets of results show the proposed procedure to be feasible and accurate and the dominant frequencies of concrete bridge-borne noise to range from 32 Hz to 100 Hz. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.