Railway Noise and Vibration

Noise and vibration measurements are carried out for railway operations both for trackside noise & vibration and for engineering measurements on and in rail vehicles. ANV Measurement Systems have been providing instrumentation for both of these applications for more than 20 years. 

The Rion NL-53 is well suited to carrying out attended, long-term unattended and, with ANV’s Live Leq System, live-to-web measurements of trackside noise. The NL-53 measures all the broadband noise indices required for railway noise (Leq, Lmax, SEL) and there are octave/third octave and audio recording options available. 

The octave/third octave option on the NL-53 is particularly well-suited to evaluating the mitigation requirements for railway noise. Setting the third octave Lmax type to “band” captures the frequency content of the Lmax (rather than the maximum in each band regardless of when the maxima occurred during the measurement period). This avoids overestimating the degree of attenuation required to counteract the (night-time) LAmax noise levels from pass-bys, which is often the factor that dictates the degree of mitigation required.

Individual pass-bys can be identified by using the short sampled sound pressure levels (10 msec – 1sec) or using the really clever audio triggering on the wav file recording option. 

The Rion VM-56 is well suited to carrying out attended, long-term unattended and, with ANV’s Live Leq System, live-to-web measurements of trackside vibration. 

There really is no better instrument for measuring trackside vibration than the Rion VM-56. Processed values (VDV, Displacement, PPV and Dominant frequency) can be recorded for measurement periods of 10 seconds – 24 hours simultaneously with 100 msec short-sampled acceleration (which enables individual vibration events to be identified). Adding the wav file recording option facilitates re-analysis of the data.

Rion’s handy, portable data acquisition systems, like the DA-21, have proved to be really useful for collecting vibration and sound data on/in railway vehicles for engineering analysis. The RioNote could offer wireless data collection of vibration data.

The Norsonic 848B is a great tool for identifying noise sources on passing railway vehicles (e.g. aerodynamic and/or pantograph noise). 

If you need microphone sets for microphone arrays, Rion microphones offer an unparalleled quality to price ratio.

If you are not certain what you need, ANV’s qualified acoustics and vibration team would be happy to discuss your application. There’s always an acoustician to talk to at ANV during normal UK office hours. 

ANV Measurement Systems UKAS Laboratory (0653), with its standard 5 day turnround, calibrates all major manufacturers’ sound and vibration instrumentation.