Feasibility study for the preparation of certified reference materials part I – mineral oil contaminated soils

The international joint project HYCREF (Contract No. G6RD-CT-2002-00854), funded by the European Commission in the 5th Framework programme, aimed to develop methods to prepare homogeneous and stable reference materials of water, soil, and waste contaminated with mineral oil hydrocarbons and to certify the mineral oil content by gas chromatographic methods. The results of a feasibility study for the preparation of three soil reference materials are discussed in this paper, and for the preparation of three waste reference materials in the second part (Koch et al., Accred Qual Assur submitted for publication). The soil materials were selected to represent different soil types and contamination levels. The project plan set three requirements for these reference materials: uncertainty in the mineral oil content resulting from the certification exercise <5%, a sample inhomogeneity of <3% and a minimum long-term stability of 5 years. For the most part, these requirements were met within this project.     

Modelling of a city canyon problem in a turbulent atmosphere using an equivalent sources approach

The sound propagation into a courtyard shielded from direct exposure is predicted using an equivalent sources approach. The problem is simplified into that of a two-dimensional city canyon. A set of equivalent sources are used to couple the free half-space above the canyon to the cavity inside the canyon. Atmospheric turbulence causes an increase in the expected value of the sound pressure level compared to a homogeneous case. The level increase is estimated using a von Kármán turbulence model and the mutual coherences of all equivalent sources' contributions. For low frequencies the increase is negligible, but at 1.6 kHz it reaches 2-5 dB for the geometries and turbulence parameters used here. A comparison with a ray-based model shows reasonably good agreement.