Refined noise mapping guidelines aiming at better noise management

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Refined noise mapping guidelines aiming at better noise

management

Gaetano Licitra, Francesco Fidecaro, Stefano Carpita, Luca Fredianelli,

Matteo Bolognese

To cite this version:

Gaetano Licitra, Francesco Fidecaro, Stefano Carpita, Luca Fredianelli, Matteo Bolognese. Refined noise mapping guidelines aiming at better noise management. Forum Acusticum, Dec 2020, Lyon, France. pp.1255-1260, �10.48465/fa.2020.0927�. �hal-03233760�

REFINED NOISE MAPPING GUIDELINES AIMING AT

BETTER NOISE MANAGEMENT

Gaetano Licitra

Francesco Fidecaro

Stefano Carpita

Luca Fredianelli

Matteo Bolognese

1 _{Environmental Protection Agency of Tuscany Region, Via V. Veneto 27, 56127 Pisa, Italy} 2 _{Physics Department “Enrico Fermi”, University of Pisa, Italy}

g.licitra@arpat.toscana.it

ABSTRACT

The maritime transport, compared to other transportation systems, offers an advantage in terms of environmental impact but an increment in traffic volumes will produce an increase in noise emissions in the surroundings. Ports are frequently surrounded by urban areas and higher noise emission increases the noise exposure of citizens. As a consequence, one of the most demanding aspects of port management is an effective noise management that allows reduction of the exposure of citizens while ensuring the traffic growth. At the same time, port areas are challenging from a noise management standpoint as they are often characterized by a high level of complexity in terms of number of different noise sources and their interaction with the other main transportation infrastructures. An effective noise modeling of the port area is actually missing and it would be helpful to identify the main noise sources and to plan mitigation measures when needed. For those reasons, under the hood of the INTERREG Maritime Program, an effort is actually undertaken on refining noise mapping guidelines on the basis of the current state of the art.

1. INTRODUCTION

Constant growth rates in maritime traffic have been registered in recent years and they are expected even more in the future [1]. However, besides the non-negligible effects of underwater acoustics on marine mammals [2], port represents an area with high noise potential.

Around the world the assessments of citizens exposure to port noise are currently very few and with the expected growth of traffic, the impact of noise will only get worse without a proper management. Excessive noise emissions and consequent complaints from citizens could also compromise the natural growth of maritime traffic. Road and railway traffic [3, 4] and airports [5, 6] received lot of attention in the last decades from the scientific community in order to study their noise emissions, map their impact in the territory and then mitigating it with innovative solution such as low-noise pavements [7, 8], monitoring systems [9, 10], sustainable metamaterial absorbers [11, 12], and sonic crystal noise barriers made of recycled materials [13].

On the other hand, ports have been studied much less in the past, and only in recent years some studies or projects concerning the noise impact came out [14, 15, 16]. Aiming at the acoustic characterization of the ship’s sources, several authors studied noise emitted at berth [17, 18, 19], while our previous work dealt with small and large vessels in movement [20, 21, 22]. Besides ships, many different sources (cranes, forklifts, reach stacker, …) act in different mode in ports, and they should be all included for a proper acoustical description. Thus, the current panorama is in its infancy and this does not help the acoustic mapping phase, which requires the best characterization of the sources.

Finally, the marginalization of port noise with respect to the major sources of infrastructure is also present at the regulatory level, being never properly treated and excluded from the strategic noise maps, which are required by the European Union only for the main roads, railways, airports and urban centers.

In order to improve this situation, the INTERREG Maritime program addresses the problem of port noise from different points of view through a set of projects. Precisely because the present literature is poor and still at the beginning, it is good to act outlining the guidelines for the acoustic mapping in port environments.

The present work highlights the measures designed to make the mapping activity effective and, at the same time, less expensive as possible. The categories of noise sources and their different activity mode to be included in the noise model are reported.

2. INTERREG PROGRAM

The INTERREG Maritime programme Italy-France 2014-2020 is conceived in order to fill the gap in knowledge regarding port noise. In order to do so, different projects are being carried out to describe the current state-of-the-art and pinpoint the best practices in terms of long-term sustainability in the north Tyrrhenian area. The approved projects aiming to assess different aspects of the port noise are:

 RUMBLE: aims to realize noise reduction infrastructure in big ports.

 MON ACUMEN: has the objective of developing a common monitoring system on the North Tyrrhenian ports;

 REPORT: aimed to develop simulation models, noise evaluation, and noise control strategies producing guidelines;

 DECIBEL: aims at the realization of infrastructures for noise reduction in small ports;  L.I.S.T. PORT: has the purpose of developing

logistics and management models for lightweight and heavyweight vehicle traffic from and to the ports.

Three Italian universities (the University of Cagliari, University of Genoa, University of Pisa), one French university (University of Corsica Pasquale Paoli), the Italian region of Liguria, two municipalities associations (ANCI Liguria, ANCI Toscana), the port authorities of the involved Italian ports (Cagliari, Genoa, La Spezia, Livorno, Portoferraio), the Environmental Protection Agency of Tuscany region (ARPAT), two municipalities (Nice Côte D’azur, Olbia), two French Chambers of Commerce and Industries (Nice, Bastia), the French research center CSTB, the Corsica’s Transports Office are the partners involved in this acoustic clusters of projects inside the programme.

Figure 1. Structure of the Interreg projects activities.

At the end of the research activities, the REPORT project will aggregate all the results reached in the different projects to summarize and capitalize them.

The results presented in this paper are obtained by means of the efforts carried out during the three projects involving big ports, i.e. RUMBLE, MON ACUMEN, and REPORT. An overview of the structure of those projects is represented in Figure 1. The definition of the state of the art of the port noise from a technical and regulatory point of view was tackled by the three projects together. A small description of the three projects will be presented in the next paragraphs.

RUMBLE, "Noise reduction in large port cities in the cross-border maritime programme" aims to reduce noise emission of ports and logistics infrastructures developing

noise reduction infrastructures in big ports. The development starts with the analysis of the state of the art in port noise in terms of available technologies and citizens' perception of port noise. In collaboration with MON ACUMEN and REPORT, a common Questionnaire was made to collect all the available data on port noise in the area of interest, and to perform an investigation on local citizens' perception of port noise. Then, after ante-operam monitoring campaigns, the infrastructures were built, and post operam noise monitoring campaigns were going to be conducted to evaluate the obtained benefits.

MON ACUMEN is an acronym for “MONitorage Actif Conjoint Urbain-MaritimE de la Nuisance”. The project aims at tackling noise monitoring and noise management in the port area, in order to allow port authorities to manage port activities in a sustainable way. The project started with an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art concerning port noise, noise monitoring, noise measurement, and acoustic characterization of port-specific noise sources. Noise maps of the involved ports are needed to correctly design the monitoring infrastructure. More specifically, a relation between the different port activities and noise levels at the receivers would allow the project to correctly pinpoint the monitoring position. The goal is to build an integrated monitoring system, following common rules for all the ports in the area, that allows real-time simultaneous noise-monitoring of all the ports and, in the case where noise exceeds the limits, identify the responsible source. REPORT project is approaching the port noise problem from a more theoretical perspective, aiming to develop models to better understand the phenomenon. The developed models are the following:

 modelization of ships as a noise source and development of an integrated tool that will allow modeling ship noise in a similar way as railways noise and road noise in MithraSIG;

 development of a neural network specialized in traffic flow analysis that will allow performing real-time prediction of noise levels based on traffic flow and traffic composition data;

 analysis of the newest propulsion technologies (electric, hybrid, fuel cell, liquified natural gas) in terms of noise reduction when adopted by cargo handling units in port areas and estimation of global noise reduction based on the total adoption of those technologies;

 econometric evaluation of social costs generated by noise pollution in the port area witch, excluding the last one, are all in the validation stage.

In the end, the validation of the noise model in the port area will be followed by a final document, which will

present all the results produced in the whole Interreg Maritime program.

3. NOISE MAPPING GUIDELINES

The present chapter summarizes the fundamental elements for a noise map, which are an accurate 3d model of the study area, a database including all the involved noise sources and, of course, an acoustical classification of the main noise sources in the area. The first subchapter describes the basic requirements, mostly common for all kinds of noise map, while the second one reports the division of port noise sources into categories.

Table 1. Input data for the 3d model. 3.1 Base information for the 3D model

A comprehensive 3D model of the area is the basic ingredient for an accurate noise mapping. The information needed should be well known to the Port authorities and they can provide it, although not always up to date.

A simple clusterization of the geographical data could be the following one:

 morphological data;  topographical data;  buildings.

Elevation points and isohypses are key points to let the simulation software to build the Digital Terrain Model (DTM). A correct DTM is especially useful for a precise calculation of the noise propagation, as well as for a proper positioning of buildings and sources. As an example, roads and railways sometimes are only provided in a 2D way, which then must be perched on the DTM. Instead, infrastructures’ maps can be directly included in the DTM when they also have elevations.

Thus, three dimensional elements that could interact with sound propagation must be included in the noise map project and they should be carefully perched on the DTM.

The followings data must be gathered and carefully reviewed:

 residentials and industrials buildings including heights;

 sensible receivers (school, hospitals);

 obstacles present such as acoustical barriers, stacks of containers and similar.

The number of inhabitants in each residential building, as well as the number of students in schools and patients in hospitals, should be retrieved in this phase for the action plan purpose. In fact, eventual noise exceeding limitations, together with a comparison with noise maps results and local noise limits would be used with inhabitants data in order to get the priority index for the action plan activities. Traffic flow data and other data must be acquired for transport infrastructures.

A summary of the elements needed is reported in Table 1, together with what they can influence.

3.2 Macro-categories subdivision of noise sources

The very first division of noise sources in the port area belongs to the NoMEPorts project [23], where the categories of “industrial” or “traffic-related” included all the possible sources. On the basis of the experience acquired with the analysis of the state of the art of port noise [24], a refined classification is here proposed. The authors found that including in one big group all the sources different than roads and railways is not enough and the error will be to include under the same category noise produced by very different activities or sources. The most important can be summarized in:

 ships noise: moving or moored;

 noise produced by the plethora of industrial plants that usually are present in a port area;

 noise produced by the port activities: loading and unloading operations, container handling, boat service operations, etc...

Most important, when excessive noise occurs, the right responsible should intervene to mitigate it. Thus, having all the three classes of sources included in different groups makes easier the task of assigning the responsibility. Even in this regard, a finer resolution of the class is needed. The macro categories are then defined as:  road sources;  railways sources;  naval sources;  port sources;  industrial sources.

In order to allow an even better attribution of responsibilities, a further geographical differentiation has been set starting from the fact that a port area is, by its nature, surrounded and penetrated by other transport infrastructures. While road or railway traffic inside the port boundaries is obviously related to the port activities, outside the boundaries the port related traffic mixes with the regular one. Thus, even if it can result difficult, the

Geographical element Needed for DTM Sound sources Receivers Propagation Elevation points and isohypses Yes X Residential and industrial buildings No X X Obstacles No X Roads If provided with elevations X Railways If provided with elevations X Industries X X Land usage (Corine land cover) X

following differentiation is required for both road and railways traffic:

 internal traffic;

 port related external traffic;

 external traffic not generated by port.

In the first instance, for both roads and railways traffic a single map including all the three components can be produced, but if criticalities arise, the proposed differentiation should be performed and will allow the evaluation of possible port responsibilities.

A deeper description of the proposed groups is presented in the following sub-paragraphs.

3.2.1 Roads sources

As discussed before, the traffic flux will be divided into three components. The internal traffic could be estimated through fluxes at the monitoring gate, but the external port related traffic could be more difficult to evaluate properly. A traffic monitoring campaign is therefore suggested, but if it is not possible for economical or practical reasons, a traffic model could be applied starting from the gate flux data to estimate the flux distribution on the road network. In any case, in the first instance a map including all the subclasses is required and specific maps should only be produced after the eventual emergence of noise criticalities.

3.2.2 Railways sources

A similar approach to the one used for road sources has been used for railways. The main difference is that trains can have a more precise differentiation between port-related and non-port-port-related traffic. As an example, in case of the absence of a passenger train station inside the port area, the entire passenger traffic could be considered not related to the port. Also, the railways' network is likely simpler compared to the roads one. For this kind of source, literature is rich and the requirements are the same for a railway noise map.

3.2.3 Naval sources

In this category fall all the activities related to movement and stationing of ships. Only the most important ships, i.e. the more frequent or noisy, should be considered. This would include all the commercial and passenger ships like RoRo, cruises, container ships, tankers and so one. Other less impactful classes of vessels like recreational crafts, law enforcement vessels, and fishing boats can be excluded from the modeling if not explicitly required or when a particular disturbance locally emerges. The aim was to avoid scattering efforts into secondary aspects that, considering the vessel population of the ports under study, would poorly contribute to the total noise emissions. As an example, taking into account the recreational crafts will require long term noise measurement that are not compatible with the requirements of the projects and, moreover, the noise

emissions will be likely negligible if compared with the ones of the commercial and passenger ships.

Noise produced by moving and/or stationary sources should be properly assessed for different types. In order to properly implement a single ship type, different noise sources must be created on the digital model of the port. However, its noise emission could widely vary based on chimney elevation, the positioning of the cooling systems’ vents, and obviously, it can vary from ship type to ship type.

3.2.4 Port sources

This category includes all the sources directly employed in port related activities, such as:

 load and unload of freight trains;  load and unload of ships;  ships’ service operations.

Examples of those activities are container load/unloads from container ships, refueling, boarding and landing of vehicles due to RoRo vessels, containers load/unloads on freight trains.

Also, for this category, a proper measurement campaign aimed at their assessment is needed.

3.2.5 Industrial sources

All the remaining industrial sources, thus excluded those already inserted in the port sources, are included here. This category can be easily described, but gathering all the information and completing the task with sufficient detail can be very complex. In fact, many industrial sites or activities are annexed to the port area and they can range to every kind of activity. Thus, many different kinds of noisy machinery can be present. As a first approximation, it is recommended to put the maximum attention to external sources like vehicles and industrial machines employed in industrial activities, and to load and unload activities related to industries. Sources inside buildings can be included if looking at more details, as it is not expected that their impact to the receiver would be significant.

4. CONCLUSION

The INTERREG Maritime program aims at improving the knowledge on port noise through a set of different projects. Among the aims of MON ACUMEN, the acoustic mapping of all the ports involved in the project is one of the most important. As the current scientific literature is poor on the subject and the topic has been few studied, a very important step before reaching the target is defining guidelines for the acoustic mapping in port environments. This will allow all ports to be aligned to the same standard while the maps’ results would be comparable.

In the present document, base information for the 3D model and a categorization of noise source have been reported. Given the number and diversity of source present in a port environment, five macro categories have

been identified: road, railways, naval port and industrial sources. Each of them has different subdivisions deserving attention. However, while some are well-known noise emitters, other needs the scientific community's attention. It is well known that the better the inputs to the model, the better the outputs will be. For this reason, for all of the ship typology, a noise emission characterization during the different phase of operation is needed and future paper will address so, as well as for port noise.

In the meanwhile, in this context of lack of information, it is extremely important the share of data about characterization of noise sources. Specific measurements procedure for the assessment of noise emissions of the different source would come out soon.

5. AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been developed in the framework of the EU cooperation projects RUMBLE, MON ACUMEN, and REPORT (Rumore e Porti). These projects are co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

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