Development of a highway traffic noise prediction model that considers various road surface types

A highway traffic noise prediction model has been developed for environmental assessment in South Korea. The model is based on an outdoor sound propagation method and is fully compliant with ISO 9613 and the sound power level (PWL) estimation for a road segment, as suggested in the ASJ Model-1998 that is based on PWLs. Due to that model’s selection of two pavement types, such as asphalt or concrete pavement, an unacceptable traffic noise prediction is made in cases where the road surface is different from that on which the model is based. In order to address this problem, several road surface types are categorized, and the PWL of each surface type is determined and modeled by measuring the noise levels obtained from newly developed methods. An evaluation of the traffic noise prediction model using field measurements finds good agreement between predicted and measured noise levels.     

A simple impulse sound source for measurements in room acoustics

This paper deals with the construction and characteristics of a specially designed wooden clapper intended to operate as an impulse sound source for measurements in rooms. It is to be used as an alternative impulse sound source for experimental estimations of impulse responses of rooms located at remote and specific places where none of the standard sound sources - an omnidirectional loudspeaker system, etc. - can be used. The paper describes the spectral characteristics and directivity of the clapper impulse. Its features are compared with other impulse sources.     

Index for vehicle acoustical comfort inside a passenger car

Sound quality is among the main factors that influence customers’ preference for choosing good automobile products. It all started more than 10 years ago and grows up so fast due to high competition in the automotive industries. A-weighted noise levels and sound power are usually utilised to measure the noise but they are not adequate to characterise the impact sound inside a car. The most popular approach to determine sound quality of a product is to define an annoyance or specific index, which involves both subjective and objective evaluations. Subjective and objective tests should be studied concurrently in order to determine the sound quality inside a passenger car. This approach is used in this paper to evaluate vehicle comfort index according to most frequently used sound quality metrics, namely; Zwicker loudness, sharpness, roughness and fluctuation strength. As a result researchers of different fields of automotive acoustics investigations can use this index according to the type of road (international road roughness) without any need to perform time-consuming jury tests. The metrics are correlated with jury test results that show which of them and how much has affected the acoustical comfort of the vehicle. The relation between road roughness and vehicle acoustical comfort index is another point of interest in this research.     

Acoustic radiation force on a sphere in standing and quasi-standing zero-order Bessel beam tweezers

Starting from the exact acoustic scattering from a sphere immersed in an ideal fluid and centered along the propagation axis of a standing or quasi-standing zero-order Bessel beam, explicit partial-wave representations for the radiation force are derived. A standing or a quasi-standing acoustic field is the result of propagating two equal or unequal amplitude zero-order Bessel beams, respectively, along the same axis but in opposite sense. The Bessel beam is characterized by the half-cone angle β of its plane wave components, such that β = 0 represents a plane wave. It is assumed here that the half-cone angle β for each of the counter-propagating acoustic Bessel beams is equal. Fluid, elastic and viscoelastic spheres immersed in water are treated as examples. Results indicate the capability of manipulating spherical targets based on their mechanical and acoustical properties. This condition provides an impetus for further designing acoustic tweezers operating with standing or quasi-standing Bessel acoustic waves. Potential applications include particle manipulation in micro-fluidic lab-on-chips as well as in reduced gravity environments.     

水下超疏油聚(3,4-乙烯基二氧)噻吩薄膜的制备

以离子液体溴化(1-己基-3-甲基咪唑盐)作为电解质和掺杂剂采用电化学一步法制备了微纳米复合结构的聚(3,4-乙烯基二氧噻吩)薄膜, 薄膜由槽内排布着纳米珠链的棒状结构组成. 研究表明, 通过控制电流密度的大小, 可以调节棒状结构和珠状结构的平均直径. 离子液体中的咪唑阳离子和对阴离子均掺杂到聚合物中, 该薄膜具有可逆的电化学活性及水下超疏油特性.     

A Simple Closed-Loop Active Control of Electrodynamic Shakers by Acceleration Power Spectral Density for Environmental Vibration Tests

This work presents the main results of a simple closed-loop active control for an electrodynamic shaker in order to generate acceleration Power Spectral Densities (PSD) according to prescribed Standards used in environmental vibration tests. The main idea is to start generating acceleration pseudo-signals obeying the prescribed Power Spectral Density and then to acquire acceleration data from the electrodynamic shaker’s table behaviour. So the Power Spectral Density of the acquired acceleration is computed and compared with the required PSD and then the time-varying pseudo-acceleration is updated to reflect this corrected PSD. It was noticed that for piecewise narrow bands frequencies, the electrodynamic shaker acceleration behaves near linearly, both in frequency and voltage, for the input signals. A code in AgilentVee 7.5 software to acquire, send and process signals for the active control in a closed-loop scheme was developed. The used A/D D/A hardware was a single PC sound card with specific characteristics. The control could be accomplished sending and acquiring at the same time with a range of input/output of ±1.5 V with 16 bits of resolution, at 48 kHz and assistance of an external sound amplifier.     

对碎裂结构岩体似连续介质特征的一点研究

通常情况下认为碎裂结构的岩体具有非连续介质的特征。但是随着西部大量水电工程的勘查和建设,遇到了一类比较特殊的岩体,这类岩体中裂隙发育,结构面间距很小,按照国标划分为碎裂结构岩体,但是其本身又具有较高的力学性质,表现为具有较高的变形模量、抗剪强度参数和完整性系数,并且具有似连续介质的特征,这与通常的碎裂结构岩体有本质的区别。本文将利用两个实例工程对这一现象进行初步的分析,得到了水电工程可利用岩体的一种新的评价方法。     

Robust tracking of moving sound source using scaled unscented particle filter

Tracking an active sound source involves the modeling of non-linear non-Gaussian systems. To address this problem, this paper proposed scaled unscented particle filter (SUPF) algorithm for tracking moving sound source. The particle filter part of the SUPF provides the general probabilistic framework to handle non-linear non-Gaussian systems, and the scaled unscented Kalman filter (SUKF) part of the SUPF generates better proposal distributions by taking into account the most recent observation. Meanwhile, models used in SUPF algorithm were also explored for the sound source motion, observation and the likelihood of the sound source location in the light of the Langevin process. Compared with the conventional PF approach, the simulated results demonstrated that the SUPF algorithm had superior tracking performance.     

Accuracy of speech transmission index predictions based on the reverberation time and signal-to-noise ratio

This paper examines the accuracy of the speech transmission index (STI) calculated from the reverberation time (T) and signal-to-noise ratio (L_SN) of enclosed spaces. Differences between measured and predicted STIs have been analysed in two rooms (reverberant vs. absorbent), for a wide range of absorption conditions and signal-to-noise ratios (sixteen tests). The STI was measured using maximum length sequence analysis and predictions were calculated using either measured or predicted values of T and L_SN, the latter assuming diffuse sound field conditions. The results obtained for all the conditions tested showed that STI predictions based on T and L_SN tend to underestimate the STI, with differences between measured and predicted STIs always lower than 0.1 (on a 0.0–1.0 scale), and on average lower than 0.06. According to previous research, these differences are noticeable and therefore non-negligible, as 0.03 is the just noticeable difference in STI. The use of either measured or predicted values of T and L_SN provided similar STI predictions (i.e. non-noticeable changes), with differences between predictions that are on average lower than 0.03 for the absorbent room, and lower than 0.01 for the reverberant room.