This project builds on earlier projects.
The initial part will comprise reviewing international criteria contained in national building codes and international standards for acceptable insulation in housing (especially those relevant to apartment or town house developments using lightweight sustainable building materials). This will be aimed at identifying 1) the basis for the criteria, 2) why we are currently finding so many complaints about noise – especially about neighbour noise, 3) recommendations for upgrading the New Zealand Building Code and 4) a proposal for different acoustical quality of NZ dwellings. This will include critiquing how the occupiers of small spaces in flats, town house and apartments experience sound between rooms different from what is generated and measured during the standard methods used in our acoustics chambers in the University of Auckland for quantifying the insulation of building components.
The second part of the project will look at the ways in which the insulation performance of buildings and building components is measured and quantified. This will include further developing previous part 4 project work investigating whether the two standard measurements for airborne and impact sound can be satisfactorily reduced to a single (i.e airborne) measurement. This would also consider whether floors which include granular materials can still be measured and quantified by traditional methods.
Undergraduate
This practical part of the project will require learning how to make measurements of impact force using an impact/impedance hammer to determine the difference that floor coverings and floor materials make to the sound of impacts on floors.
The review part of the project will be guided mainly by papers by Birgit Rasmussen (e.g. Sound insulation between dwellings – Comparison of national requirements in Europe and interaction with acoustic classification schemes in PROCEEDINGS of the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics 2019).
The theoretical part concerning the connection between impact and airborne sound insulation will be guided by 1) M. Heckl and E. J. Rathe, “Relationship between the transmission loss and the impact-noise isolation of floor structures,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 35,1825–1830 (1963); I. 2) L. Ver, “Relation between the normalized impact sound level and sound transmission loss,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 50, 1414–1417 (1971);3) M Yairi et al, “Relationship between sound radiation from sound-induced and force-excited vibration: Analysis using an infinite elastic plate model” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 140 (1), 453-460 (2016)) to establish the connection for forced as well as resonant transmission.
Mecheng 731
Acoustics Lab (City 422.154, Lab)