Numerical modelling of ground-borne noise and vibration in buildings due to surface rail traffic

This paper deals with the numerical computation of the structural and acoustic response of a building to an incoming wave field generated by high-speed surface railway traffic. The source model consists of a moving vehicle on a longitudinally invariant track, coupled to a layered ground modelled with a boundary element formulation. The receiver model is based on a substructuring formulation and consists of a boundary element model of the soil and a finite element model of the structure. The acoustic response of the building's rooms is computed by means of a spectral finite element formulation. The paper investigates the structural and acoustic response of a multi-story portal frame office building up to a frequency of 150Hz to the passage of a Thalys high-speed train at constant velocity. The isolation performance of three different vibration countermeasures: a floating-floor, a room-in-room, and base-isolation, are examined.