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The present article studies what effect the shape of a rigid acoustic barrier has on the acoustic insertion loss provided by the barrier. The Boundary Element Method (BEM), formulated in the frequency domain, is used to evaluate the sound propagation around acoustic screens in the vicinity of a tall building. The acoustic screen is assumed to be non-absorbing, and the building is modeled as an infinite barrier. Signals in the time domain are obtained from the frequency domain computations by applying inverse Fourier transforms. In the examples provided, the height of the acoustic barrier remains constant, but different geometric shapes are modeled. The results obtained for a vertical barrier are used as a reference.

Acoustic barriers are a well-known environmental noise mitigation solution, which is widely used nowadays. In this work, it is expected to contribute to the body of knowledge regarding the physical and technical behavior of those barriers by developing and implementing a set of models that allow an accurate analysis of noise barriers with new configuration types. A 2.5D boundary-only numerical model is developed and implemented, and computational analyses are performed in order to compare different surface profiles of the acoustic barriers. The particular case in which two acoustic barriers are used, one at each side of the road, is addressed.