The recent incline in the weather highlighted a growing need to alert the public to flood warnings. Add to that the potential threats posed by the War in Ukraine, the German federal government and associated German states identified a need to update the existing post-Cold War sirens.
The local authorities installed new digital siren systems that were funded by an 88 Mio EUR-backed funding program. Electronic sirens support power control with the option to change signal direction and manage speech transmissions. The responsibility for simulating how the sound from this new system propagates fell to ATDI’s flagship modelling tool, HTZ. Featuring a Sound coverage calculator, users calculated the impact of different terrains, building density, signal strength, heights of emitters and the siren system configuration on sound propagation. These simulation results reflect the different heights of the emitting installation, power direction and minimum sound levels.
Contracted public-safety engineering company accellonet managed the system installation. As a regular HTZ user, the team set up siren locations as “stations” and used the signal direction as an antenna parameter. Predominantly, the omnidirectional signal propagation from a source point was applied as default. They incorporated a building layer using LOD2 data and a 1m grid clutter to model the coverage areas. The results identified that buildings were the main sound blockers with streets propagating the sound well.
Patrick Drews from accellonet, says, “Using HTZ was an easy choice. We’ve successfully used HTZ in-house for many years to provide fast and accurate results. The results were exported to a GIS for presentation along with the site parameters for planning.”
This project is the first of many planned across Germany. The 88 Mio EUR funding program will finance the replacement systems for up to 16 local authorities. Lessons learned from the installation of this first system provide a strong foundation for future rollouts.
Looking to the next phase of upgrades, accellonet will provide speech transmission index (STI) calculations to measure speech transmission quality. They also propose to improve integration by using geographical information systems such as ArcGIS and with the aid of scripting speed up calculations.
For more information about Sound coverage calculations in HTZ, contact ATDI today.
Who are accellonet GmbH
Accellonet GmbH is a German engineering company operating in the public security and safety domain. Their target market is mission-critical communication and IT systems. Since its inception in 2007, its mission has been to resolve challenges faced across the public safety, government and security market sector. More information on www.accellonet.com
