Multifunctional Acoustic Concrete Metamaterial Sound Wall Summary

Led by Dr. Amir Alavi, this project focuses on the use of concrete metamaterial to build a first-of-its-kind multifunctional sustainable wall with both noise cancellation and nitric acid reducing functionalities. Small and large-scale metamaterial noise walls would be developed with a concrete 3D printer. The goal is to come up with a final design that can later be deployed for road demonstrations and testing. Preliminary calculations suggest using metamaterial walls with predominately open areas can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in material cost savings, and could potentially dissipate more than 90% of the noise and reduce nitric acid levels as low as 19% of current levels.