Acoustic labelling of tires, road vehicles and road pavements: A vision for substantially improved procedures

Abstract

The EU requires vehicle tires to be tested for noise emission and labelled. Some other countries also have similar procedures. Preparations for labelling of acoustical properties of road pavements is also ongoing in EU. Road vehicles and their tires must be tested and meet noise limits worldwide. However, all cases involve problems with measurement methods and conditions, which create uncertainties higher than desirable to make fair decisions on which product to select. For tires and road vehicles the major obstacle is the test track surface, which cannot be sufficiently well defined and reproducible. Also, far from all products (tires) are measured, so commonly only the noisiest products are correctly labelled. Although attempts are made to go indoors to do the measurements, they are still for the foreseeable future going to be made outdoors, with all the influence of weather and seasons that this causes. The author has worked most of his long career with such issues and in this paper, the author outlines his vision of how most of the problems (uncertainties) can be reduced to acceptable levels, mainly by making measurements indoors, with reproducible and representative conditions for both the labelling and the actual noise emission in traffic.