Soil vibration and auralisation software tools for application in railways

Abstract

The main objective of the SILVARSTAR Shift2Rail project is to develop validated software tools in the field of ground vibration and auralisation. The first project work stream focuses on the prediction of ground vibration through the development of a hybrid approach, combining numerical prediction with experimental results. The general framework adopted expresses the vibration level in a building as the product of terms describing the source, the propagation through the soil and the receiver. In the second work stream, auralisation and Virtual Reality (VR) software tools are developed based on physical models to synthesise railway noise in high quality. The novel auralisation and VR tools enable perception-based evaluation of noise mitigation technologies and an effective demonstration of different noise scenarios, including noise mitigation measures and vehicle design variants.