Assessment of acoustic properties of different recycled polymer-based materials for road work sound barrier walls application

This paper examines environmentally-friendly alternatives for rock and glass wools in sound barrier walls applications. Around road-work construction sites, the most disturbing frequencies are between 500 and 2,000 Hz. Therefore, the materials should be acoustically efficient within this frequency range, and all measurements should be carried out. More interestingly, those 3 materials seem to be better than rock or glass wool as they exhibit higher absorption coefficients. Only material D appears to be less efficient in spite of its larger thickness. This result can be ascribed to a lack of compaction as it has the lowest density among the 4 selected materials. It was shown that, in terms of sound absorption, the selected recycled fiber-polymers seem to be equal or better than rock or glass wool. Due to this encouraging result, acoustic characterization of the recycled material on an experimental on-scale sound barrier wall and modeling are presently in progress.