This proposal from the Universities in Lund and Aalborg and several industrial and other partners in the Øresund-Kattegat Region aims both to further the economic growth in the Region and to create a more sustainable environment by reducing noise and vibrations in buildings and dwellings.

The environmental goal will be achieved by development and validation of new, innovative, optimization-based design tools. These include methods to minimize noise and vibrations generated by, e.g., central heating, heat recovery and ventilation systems in the buildings, and methods of designing buildings and dwellings against sound and vibration from outside automobile, rail and air traffic. Note here that while the current trend towards light-weight constructions may be of both economical and environmental benefit by saving of material and transportation energy, the trend also requires development of new design tools against generation of noise because there is a very complicated, design-dependent trade-off between reduction of structural weight and reduction of the level of sound and vibration.

The economic growth will arise as large trans-frontier added values, as there is a marked difference between the industrial partners in Sweden and Denmark and the project will initiate and intensify the collaboration among this large group of partners with mutually complementary business areas. Hence, building contractors and insulation manufacturers from Sweden will co-operate with consulting firms and manufacturers of components and systems for heating, heat recovery and ventilation from Denmark. This way, the project will provide the partners with a wealth of new opportunities.

At the same time, the scientific collaboration between the universities and their co-operation with the R&D institutes, associations, consulting firms and industy will significantly further the knowledge- and educational infrastructure in the Region.

The project will also contribute to a harmonization of legal requirements and acoustic classification criteria for buildings, which are currently quite different in our two countries and therefore set barriers for the trans-frontier collaboration and trade. By making use of the other activities of the project, we expect that the legal requirements and classification criteria concerning acoustic comfort in buildings may be syncronized (and possibly optimized) to great benefit for our countries that may hereby acquire a role model for other EU-countries.

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