Keywords: railway-induced, noise, vibration, meshless methods, method of fundamental solutions, blocked forces.

This paper reviews the evolution of research carried out at the Acoustical and Mechanical Engineering Laboratory of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya on the prediction of railway-induced noise and vibration, connecting two topics that have separately marked the group's activity in recent years: meshless boundary-type methods for wave propagation simulation, namely the method of fundamental solutions and the singular boundary method, and the blocked force concept applied to substructuring problems. The paper first revisits a hybrid experimental/numerical methodology, developed in collaboration with the University of Porto, in which a set of virtual point forces distributed over an auxiliary surface is used to reconstruct the incident vibration field measured near an existing railway line and to predict the resulting response of a future nearby building. It is then shown that this virtual-source formulation is closely connected to the blocked force method, with the method of fundamental solutions and the singular boundary method emerging as particular cases depending on whether the collocation points and virtual sources are placed on the auxiliary or the physical boundary. Building on this connection, two recent applications of the blocked force method developed by the group are described: a methodology to account for strong dynamic coupling between the railway track system and the targeted building in where to predict the ground-borne vibration levels, and a track-independent approach to characterise railway rolling stock as a ground-borne vibration source.

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