
SILVARSTAR, a two-year European research project funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, aims to provide the railway community with software tools and methodologies to assess the noise and vibration environmental impact of railway traffic. The project brings together a unique consortium of six leading industrial and academic partners from five European countries with complementary knowhow and skills to ensure the industrial uptake and delivery of tangible results.
Besides Empa, these include Vibratec (France, Coordinator), Wölfel Engineering (Germany), the University of Southampton (UK), KU Leuven (Belgium) and UNIFE - European Rail Industry Association (Belgium). Empa will lead the development of new Virtual Reality (VR) tools allowing to simulate future noise scenarios. Railway noise will be synthesized using physics-based computational models.
In Empa’s Aura Lab in Dübendorf, acoustic and optical information - for example from means of transport - can be experienced. Image: Empa