SMART CITIES
Original BRENS EUROPE Rail Sound Absorbers
Urban transport structures (streets, railways. tramways, parking areas, storage and manufacturing surfaces) strongly influence the city climate and the quality of life in towns and cities. They are a source of noise, vibrations and dust. Streets, parking areas, storage surfaces, and manufacturing sites create huge “heat accumulators”. Urban development thus creates heat islands, which are a significant factor of microclimatic changes. Rapid and safe road transport requires the construction of solid, level and drained roadways. Their use for the humanisation of urban spaces is minimal. Railway or tramway transport requires a permanently stable track geIn the Converting Waste into Resources competition, the BRENS STERED rail noise absorber with a water retention function has been accorded the “Best Secondary Raw Material Product 2018” by the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic. This new and advanced technical solution is certain to find its use in other European cities in their effort to cope with environmental problems, the humanisation of public space and adjustment to climate change. As a matter of interest, in 2018 the Slovak city of Košice became the
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ometry. Today, this is ensured by technically well mastered track understructures and superstructures made of crossbeams laid on a gravel bed or a fixed track. Consequently, the whole space between the rails and within them is ready for being returned into the life cycle of the Earth by nature-friendly measures. The current method of creating green tramway tracks is to spread earth and humus layers within the track structure, overgrown with intensively or extensively cultivated strips of grass. “From the environmental point of view, without sufficient artificial watering in the summer months, however, natural lawns lose their purpose, the noise first city in the world to use the BRENS STERED rail sound absorber with a water retention function in the modernisation of the tram track in SNP Street with a surface formed by an artificial lawn and vegetation carpets. Sixty per cent of the original concrete panel surface was replaced by water retention and sound reduction absorbers, thus reducing sunshine heat accumulation on a 1 360 m long track by 55 per cent to 482 000 litres of rainwater. This installed rainwater retention capacity will retain up to 97 per cent of the annual rainfall total.
Photo: BRENS EUROPE archives
Rail sound absorbers are a new original technology combining three essential requirements facing today´s railways: noise and vibration reduction, thermal island elimination and the use of railway surfaces for precipitation retention, and turning wastes into raw material, based on circular economy principles. Therefore, the main benefits of their use are noise elimination from rail transport, new green space creation in towns and improvement of climatic conditions in enclosed city agglomerations. “This requires modernising the preparation and realisation of railway construction that will eliminate their part played in city overheating and thermal island creation,” says Jan Eisenreich, Statutory Director of BRENS EUROPE in Plzeň.
