Wooden Buildings in Silent Sustainable Cities

Research Project, 2018 – 2022

The densification of our cities continues unabated. Urban densification, despite the economic and social opportunities it offers, brings with it challenges to the well-being of our citizens. A direct effect of densification is the rise in noise- and vibration producing sources, which, when coupled with the rising use of lightweight construction materials, such as wood, often leads to the exceedance of healthy noise and vibration levels. The use of wood as construction material rises and it tends to be more environmentally friendly than traditional building designs, thus contributing to societal sustainability goals. The project will develop methods capable of predicting the levels of potentially disturbing vibrations and structure-borne noise in lightweight buildings, as a first step towards mitigating their effect on the well-being of building occupants. Through a combination of computational modeling techniques and experimental validation studies, it will, for example, be possible to assess how close, for occupant comfort, a wooden building can be situated to a vibration source such as a railway.

The developed methodology will be implemented in the design process and will therefore facilitate sustainable densification without sacrificing quality of life. To address the research challenges, we have assembled a team of researchers from different departments at Lund University and from Chalmers University of Technology, with complementary expertise, and we have secured the collaboration of industrial partners, who will all work together to develop and validate the methods for the assessment of noise and vibrations in sustainable dense cities, and to implement the innovative tools in the design process.