Design Tools

If you find that your scheme exceeds your noise criterion, you will need to design some mitigation to reduce noise levels.  There are many sorts of mitigation, depending on the noise source you are dealing with.

It is in the nature of noise control that the first task is to identify the main sources of noise.  NoiseMap has design tools to help with this.

  • show source contribution – this colours each source from red for the greatest contributor to blue for the smallest contributor of noise at a particular receiver;
  • save source contribution to csv file – this shows all the ‘corrections’ used in the calculation of each source, plus the total level for each source, in a form that you can process in a spreadsheet. You can use this to rank the importance of each noise source and to identify such issues as barriers that are not working well.

Designing noise barriers – one way of reducing noise can be to use noise barriers or to increase the height of noise barriers.  NoiseMap has a tool that lets you easily make temporary adjustments to the height of noise barriers so that you can quickly evaluate the effectiveness of this approach.

The relative heights of a noise source, the receiver point and the noise barrier make a great difference to the effectiveness of barriers that cannot always be appreciated in a plan view. A 3-d view is the best way of understanding the situation, but it can take a while to generate.  A much quicker alternative is to draw a cross-section – this can be drawn instantaneously and is often enough to let you see the issues.

The Find function – in a big model, it can be hard to see just where the problems lie.  The Find function will quickly show you receivers where a particular noise level has been exceeded.

Colour Labelling – you can label receiver points with their noise level coloured according to your chosen scale.  This can help to identify problem areas quickly.