The dissertation was defended at the public meeting of the Dissertation Defence Council of the Scientific Field of Civil Engineering in the Aula Doctoralis hall of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University at 10 a.m. on 14 March 2025.
Sustainable development of rail transport requires adequate mitigation of the noise emitted by rolling stock. Low noise barriers, which effectively mitigate rolling noise arising from the rail/wheel interaction, are a suitable means of noise reduction on railways where the speed of rolling stock does not exceed 250 km/h. However, to ensure their effectiveness, such barriers should be applied under certain conditions, and their technical parameters should be properly selected. The dissertation aims to present recommendations for applying low-noise barriers in straight sections of railway tracks and an algorithm to select a low-noise barrier to reduce the impact of rolling noise on the environment. The work addresses several main tasks: determines the insertion loss of a noise barrier by experiment and uses numerical simulation to compare the effectiveness of different height noise barriers in mitigating the noise of rolling stocks moving at different speeds. The dissertation consists of an Introduction, three chapters, conclusions, and references. The introduction formulates the research problem, describes the relevance of the work and the object of research, formulates the aim and tasks of the work, describes the research methodology, the scientific novelty of the work, the practical significance of the work results and defended statements, and presents the structure of the dissertation. The first chapter revises the used literature. It describes the mechanism and models of the noise caused by the wheel/rail interaction, examines the legal regulation of the noise emitted by the railway track, and examines scientific research on mitigating the noise emitted by the railway track. Based on the experience of foreign countries and after evaluating the conditions of Lithuania, a model of applying a low noise barrier has been created. The second chapter analyses the correlation between rolling stock speed and the level of noise emitted by railways and suggests methods of experimental research. The third chapter evaluates the effectiveness of noise mitigation measures using a multi-criteria method. Experimental studies of noise barriers in field conditions and numerical modelling using the CadnaA package were carried out to determine the effectiveness of noise barriers of various sizes in mitigating the noise emitted by the railway track. A statistical analysis of the low noise barrier parameters that influence the insertion loss values was performed. Seven scientific articles were published on the topic of the dissertation: two in scientific journals included in the Web of Science, one in a reviewed scientific journal, one in the Web of Science Proceedings database publications, and three in the scientific conference publications.
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