BRAINS – the concepts behind a quick and efficient tool for prediction of exterior and interior railway vehicle noise

Anders Frid , Ulf Orrenius , Torsten Kohrs , Siv Leth

BRAINS (Bombardier RAIlway Noise Software) is a validated acoustic prediction software for interior and exterior noise of railway vehicles. It was originally developed to meet the specific needs in the industry for quick decision making in tender and early design phases. Over the years the tool has evolved by extending the modelling scope and level of detail now making it a cornerstone of the complete acoustics management process. One key feature is that BRAINS handles exterior and interior noise predictions with the same model input data as basis thanks to an efficient computational framework. It interacts with the Bombardier acoustics source and material database and can also import data from specialised software such as TWINS. For exterior noise BRAINS is well positioned to be used for the emerging field of “virtual acoustic authorisation” as an alternative to physical testing. It incorporates TWINS rolling noise input as well as other sources represented by 1/3-octave band sound power and directivity. For interior noise the calculations are based on an SEA model for the interior volume into which the injected acoustic power comes from transfer functions derived from analytical, statistical and empirical formulations.

Mots clés: Railway; prediction; software

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Anders Frid, Ulf Orrenius, Torsten Kohrs, Siv Leth. BRAINS – the concepts behind a quick and efficient tool for prediction of exterior and interior railway vehicle noise. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811162⟩