Applied Acoustics
Sun W., Thompson D. J., Zhang Zh. and Squicciarini G.
Rail vehicles are long narrow spaces with unusual acoustic properties. We investigated the spatial decay of sound within a rail vehicle and its relation to the reverberation time and absorption. We made measurements inside five different rail vehicles and also used ray tracing models. We found that the average absorption coefficients cannot be deduced from the measured reverberation times using the Sabine formula. Statistical Energy Analysis is commonly used but we found that results do not converge as the subsystem size is refined. We demonstrate a practical alternative method using modified coupling loss factors based on an analytical corridor model.
