Study on Noise Reduction with Paving Different Low Noise Pavement Materials

This paper evaluates the amount of noise reduction when using different pavement materials in two adjacent lanes, where the close-proximity (CPX) method is introduced to analyze the tire/road noise before and after pavement maintenance. We consider four types of pavement materials, including ECA-10, PUC-10, PAC-13, and double-layer porous asphalt pavement (PAC-13+PUC-10), where these materials and their combinations are paved on two adjacent lanes. We measure the tire/road noise with the CPX method using a two-wheel trailer that can install two types of tires in different tests. This study provides some guidelines on controlling traffic noise pollution by using the combination of low noise pavement materials. From the experimental and theoretical results, one can see that the highest amount of noise reduction can be obtained when both the inner and outer lanes use the double-layer porous asphalt pavement. To make a balance between the noise reduction performance and the road maintenance cost, one can have the suboptimal choice, where the inner lane uses PUC-10 and the outer lane uses the double-layer porous asphalt pavement.