This paper explores attempts made in North America to govern noise and uses the current debates over the impact of wind turbines on human health as a site for examining the politics of noise regulation. I address a number of key questions: First, how has noise been defined and how have these definitions changed over time? Second, how have we tried to control noise and on what grounds have we done this? Lastly, how have our responses to noise been shaped by who is making the noise and who is being disturbed? I argue that our understandings of noise and how we regulate it cannot be disentangled from the broader social, political, cultural, and technological contexts in which these discussions take place. Ultimately, the debates about noise regulation have as much to do with who is making the noise and who is being disturbed as the noise, itself.

In water supply installations, noise pollution often occurs. As a basic component of a system, a flush valve may frequently be a source of noise and vibration generated by cavitation or high turbulence levels. During valve closing or valve opening, cavitation can be a problem. In order to decrease the noise and to improve the design inside a flush valve, some experimental and numerical analyses were carried out in our laboratories. These analyses led to some improvements in the design of the valves. Cavitation occurrence was more specifically addressed, using numerical simulation, and this is the main aim of the present paper. Particularly, the use of a simplified numerical test without cavitation model is compared with one using a cavitation model. In order to define potential cavitation risks in some parts of the valve, it has been found that a simplified approach provides an accurate overview. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of cavitating flow of water through an industrial flush valve were performed using the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with a near-wall turbulence model. The flow was assumed turbulent, incompressible and steady. Two commercial CFD codes (Fluent 6.3 and Star CCM+ 3.04.009) were used to analyse the effects of inlet pressure as well as mesh size and mesh type on cavitation intensity in the flush valve.

La qualité sonore des véhicules constitue aujourd'hui un critère important de conception. Dans ce cadre, la détection de sources acoustiques est une problématique majeure. En effet, si l'analyse du bruit dans une cavité peut être traitée de manière classique (FEM, BEM...), les problèmes inverses posent souvent des problèmes liés à la taille des calculs effectués ou au conditionnement des matrices à inverser. Nous nous proposons ici d'étudier une méthode énergétique simplifiée (MES) qui présente la particularité d'être avantageusement inversible. Le but de la méthode proposée est de parvenir à localiser des sources acoustiques surfaciques à partir de mesures effectuées dans une cavité.