"Acoustic ray tracing in a single urban canyon"

Supervised by G.Brown

Abstract

A ray tracing computer model has been developed to simulate sound propagation in an urban street environment. The various components of the model – the street and the cuboid shaped buildings which border it – are user-definable. The sound source may be placed on any part of the road. The model calculates the intensity of the sound at different places on the road and analyses the result for receivers evenly distributed over the on the street. A graphical representation of the sound pressure level at the various receivers' positions has been developed using the Matlab mathematical simulation package.

In addition to discussing the procedures used for the development of this software model, this study explores other possible modelling techniques and data structure optimisation. Two test cases were processed using the model, and the resultant data conformed to the expected findings concerning the individual receivers' expected decay curve.