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Description
Railway rolling noise is generated by the vibrations of wheel and track components induced by the wheel-rail roughness interaction. Most existing modelling approaches focus on the wheel and rail as the dominant sources, while sleepers are generally simplified. This study comprehensively evaluates the sleeper contribution by combining a reduced-order multi-sleeper track model with a wheelset model, both based on three-dimensional Finite Element (FE) formulations, to compute the structural responses generated by wheel/rail interaction. The resulting surface velocity fields of the wheel, rail, and sleepers are incorporated into a separate three-dimensional Boundary Element (BE) calculation to compute the radiated noise. This yields both the typically investigated sound power and sound pressure levels at any receiver position.The model is validated against field measurements from the Swiss Railway Field Laboratory (RFL). First, sleeper vibrations are analysed under controlled excitation of the free track and during pass-by to assess the accuracy of the structural model. Predicted rolling noise levels, with and without sleeper contributions, are then compared with RFL data.The validated results demonstrate that sleepers contribute significantly to rolling noise at low frequencies, highlighting the importance of including sleeper radiation in railway noise prediction models.