Sound barriers have been widely adopted and installed to reduce the noise level produced at locations adjacent to Shinkansen track. Although a number of different types of sound barriers with specific features in their configurations have been developed; a quantitative evaluation for their advantages has not been clarified as yet. Therefore, a number of experiments with scaled models were carried out. Experiments were made for various types of sound barriers to evaluate the noise level as reduced, and sound barriers of effective configurations (Y-shaped noise barriers) based on the experimental results were proposed. Furthermore, the effective results during filed tests with the running of Shinkansen vehicle was verified.

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