Scaled test bench for the assessment of wave impeding barriers

Recently, several cases emerged in the Netherlands where the infrastructure manager was forced to implement mitigation techniques to reduce the nuisance caused by train traffic. A possible technique to reduce the vibration propagation without intervening on the track, insuring no traffic interruption, consists of the construction ofWave Impeding Barriers (WIB). These are made of concrete walls built in the ground, combined with an isolation (resilient) layer. The concept is to reduce the vibration by introducing a cut–off frequency due to the impedance mismatch on the horizontal direction of the propagation path. In order to study the efficiency of WIBs a scale test was developed, within the CargoVibes project [24]. The goal is to test different WIB compositions (different concrete plates and different isolation layers), in order to optimize the design of WIBs. This paper deals with the design of the scale test. It presents the theoretical concepts that were used for the definition of the geometry, as well as a discussion on the requirements, assumptions and limitations of the proposed test setu