Bioinspired Hierarchical MetaMaterials for Railways

Railway-induced ground-borne vibrations are one of the main causes of noise pollution generated by trains.

Noise pollution is a serious concern for public health, causing the loss of about 1 million years of healthy life every year in the EU.

This problem will probably worsen due to the expected increase of railway traffic as an answer to the EU carbon emission reduction goals.

For this reason, reducing ground-borne vibration is of paramount importance to protect citizen lives and enable carbon emission reductions.

However, the products currently available on the market struggle to solve this issue due to multiple limitations, i.e. low attenuation performances, high costs and high impact during installation (railway track removal and railway traffic interruption).Bioinspired MetaMaterials (MMs), which are artificially designed materials inspired by shapes and topology found in nature, have the potential to increase vibration reduction performance, with reduced cost and easy installation (no track removal) compared to current solutions.

Their study and development are the objectives of the FET Open BOHEME project, whose preliminary results (i.e. increased attenuation in specific frequency ranges via the combination of different mechanisms) are promising for railway applications.

Starting from these results and the on-field experience of the startup PhononicVibes in railway vibration, BioMetaRail will determine the innovation potential and feasibility of bioinspired MMs in the railway sector.

This will be done by (i) identifying the most suitable designs from BOHEME, assessing their cost-effectiveness, (ii) benchmarking the existing solutions available on the market, (iii) engaging the most relevant end users among Railway Infrastructure Owners to assess the market potential of the proposed solution and (iv) defining the business case and the related commercialization process.