Plant Species Selection Based on Leaf Vibration Experiments

Noise pollution is exacerbated by the rapid urban development. Noise has a serious impact on both people's life and cities' ecological environment. Noise should be controlled immediately. Plants are one of the natural noise-reducing materials, which becomes increasingly important and popular. In urban landscape design, it is very important to select the plant species which have good noise reduction effect. The aim of this paper is to find out the characteristics of the plants with good noise reduction effect and apply it in urban landscape design. In this study, an experiment of sound attenuation by plants focusing on leaf vibration is carried out. This study investigates the vibration of leaves of 6 plant species in a sound field using a Keyence (IG-1000 / CCD) Laser Micrometre. The results show that the vibration amplitudes of plant leaves increase significantly by about 4-12 mu m after being stimulated by sound. In addition, driven by the same sound, the amplitudes of all leaves varied with the difference of leaf thickness, leaf area and leaf mass. The amplitudes of all leaves increase with the increase of leaf area and leaf mass, while decrease with the increase of leaf thickness.