Abstract: In recent years, more and more people pay attentions to high-speed railway noise problem. It is very effective to solve the problem by mounting the noise barrier at the sides of the track. A numerical model based on boundary element method is established to calculate the insertion loss of the noise barriers, combined with the noise sources of high-speed train obtained by the Beamforming noise source identification system. The numerical model is also used to predict the sound fields along with the viaduct with and without the noise barriers when a high-speed train passes by the measure points at different speeds. There is a good agreement between the numerical and experimental results. The numerical results show that, at the field point of 25 m from the track, the difference between the predicted result and experiment result is only 1.3 dB(A). At the measure point of 30 m far from the track, the insertion loss reaches 7 dB(A) for a 2.15 high noise barrier and increases by 1¬¬-2 dB(A) with an increase of 0.5 m in its height. The insertion loss decreases as the traveling speed goes up. The noise reduction becomes large after 1 000 Hz.

Key words: High-speed railway noise, Noise barrier, Prediction model, Sound propagation