Noise Impact and Improvement on Indoors Acoustic Comfort for the Building Adjacent to Heavy Traffic Road

Abstract

A good acoustic environment is absolutely essential to maintaining a high level satisfaction and moral health among residents. Noise and other boresome sounds come from both indoor and outdoor sources. For the residential buildings adjacent to heavy traffic roads, outdoors traffic noise is the main source that affects indoor acoustic quality and health. Ventilation and outdoor noise prevention become a pair of contradictions for the residents in China nowadays for those buildings adjacent to heavy traffic roads. It is investigated that traffic noise emission is mainly constituted by the motors of trucks, buses and motorcycles as well as brake. In this paper, two methods of traffic noise reduction on the indoor sound environment and comfort are carried out to study and compare the residential buildings adjacent to heavy traffic roadway in a city. One is to install noise barriers on the two sides of the roadway, which consist of sound-proof glass and plastic materials. The effect of sound-insulation of this method is heavily dependent on the relative distance between the noise barrier and indoors. A reduction of sound with an average pressure level of 2-15dB is achieved on the places behind and under the noise barrier. However, for the equivalent of noise barrier height, the noise reduction effect is little. As for the places of higher than the noise barrier, the traffic noise will be even strengthened by 3-7dB. Noise increment can be seen at the points of distance farther than 15m and height more than noise barrier; the noise reduction effect is not satisfactory or even worsened. In addition, not every location is appropriate to install the noise barrier along the heavy traffic roads. The other method of noise reduction for the buildings adjacent to heavy traffic is to install the airproof and soundproof windows, which is the conversion from natural ventilation to mechanical ventilation. A reduction of sound with an average pressure level of 5dB to 17dB can be achieved compared with common glass windows, if adopting sound proof glass windows. These two methods are helpful to isolate high frequency noise but not for low frequency noise. For those frequency noises, installing thick and cotton curtain and porous carpet can only decrease 2.4-4.5dB, which hardly contributes to indoor sound comfort, so further study is demanded to cut down traffic noise, especially to cut down the low frequency noise.