Speaker
Description
Reliable prediction of environmental noise in urban areas remains challenging due to the combined effects of atmospheric variability, irregular terrain, buildings, and noise barriers. Most engineering models currently used in practice are based on ray-tracing or simplified energetic approaches, which may have limited accuracy at low frequencies and in geometrically complex environments.In this work, we present a high-fidelity three-dimensional simulation framework for outdoor sound propagation based on direct numerical solution of the acoustic wave equation. The numerical method employs Summation-By-Parts (SBP) finite-difference operators combined with the Simultaneous Approximation Term (SAT) technique for stable boundary treatment. The solver is implemented in CUDA and incorporates realistic terrain and atmospheric data, enabling efficient kilometer-scale simulations on GPUs.Particular focus is placed on low-frequency traffic noise propagation in urban environments containing buildings and noise barriers. Efficient reduced-order representations of barriers and buildings are introduced to significantly reduce computational cost while retaining the dominant low-frequency acoustic effects. Simulations are compared with predictions obtained using the Nord2000 model as implemented in SoundPLAN.The results demonstrate that wave-based simulations capture diffraction, interference, and shielding effects that are difficult to represent using traditional ray-based methods. In several complex urban configurations, substantial differences in predicted sound pressure levels are observed, particularly at low frequencies and in shadow regions behind buildings and barriers. The proposed framework provides a high-fidelity complement to existing engineering prediction tools for environmental noise assessment.