Prediction of Noise Transmission in Lightweight Building Constructions

Noise annoyance in dwellings and office buildings is an important problem. The noise transmission between adjacent rooms in a building occurs directly through separating constructions as well as over different paths that include flanking building elements. The standard EN 12354 describing a simplified statistical energy analysis (SEA) subsystem approach provides a valuable tool to predict the flanking transmission of air-borne and structure-borne sound already in the stage of design. The losses that occur at the junctions, where different building elements are interconnected, play a key role in the EN 12354 standard, since they dominate the sound insulation of flanking paths. However lightweight building constructions typically do not meet the requirements for ideal SEA subsystems and therefore applying the EN12354 standard to lightweight building constructions may result into imprecise predictions. The objective of the present research project is to obtain a better knowledge of noise transmission for junctions of lightweight building elements and derive more precise prediction models, either as an extension of the SEA approach or based on finite element (FEM) solutions.