Glynn, Charles D.

At the present time the Federal Highway Administration is developing a new highway noise prediction model called TNM that is anticipated to be a superior model than its predecessor STAMINA 2.0. TNM will use frequency dependent measured noise source heights as a function of speed, acceleration, pavement type, road grade and vehicle class in its propagation loss and insertion loss calculations. Also, TNM will split the equivalent source height into two sub-sources at specified heights and calculate the insertion loss of noise barriers from these two sub-sources. The accuracy of this concept is investigated in this thesis, and it is found that on the average the two sub-source approach is less accurate than the single equivalent source approximation but will overestimate the attenuated levels, thus a conservative barrier height can be designed from this result.