Building Acoustics 01: Finite Element Model of an Building Acoustics Test Facility to Predict the Sound Transmission Loss Based on DIN EN ISO 10140

TL;DR

This paper presents a finite element model of a building acoustics test facility to predict sound transmission loss, aiding early-stage virtual prototyping in building design.

Contribution

It introduces a finite element-based virtual prototype aligned with DIN EN ISO 10140, validated against commercial software for accurate sound transmission loss estimation.

Findings

Finite element model accurately predicts sound transmission loss.

Double-leaf wall with insulation shows good agreement with literature.

Model effectively estimates sound transmission across a range of frequencies.

Abstract

In the context of building acoustics, sound transmission loss estimations are crucial to quantify the noise pollution in buildings. When developing building prototypes in the sense of an acoustic-oriented design process, it is desirable to have an virtual prototype, especially in early development stages, to estimate, for instance, the influence of different material or geometry configurations on to the sound transmission loss. This contribution aims to present a simple virtual prototype of an building acoustics test facility in accordance with DIN EN ISO 10140 for the measurement of the sound transmission loss of single- and double-leaf walls with and without insulation. Here, the finite element method is used as the numerical modelling method of choice. In the course of this, geometry and mesh creation was done using SALOME 9.14 whereas the institute's in-house research code elPaSo was utilised for the matrix assembly and solving procedure. At first, elPaSo was verified by the commercial software COMSOL 6.3 considering a small-scale test facility. Afterwards, the large-scale test facility finite element model was created using a frequency- and domain-specific discretisation approach. The sound transmission loss of three different test specimens was estimated in one-third-octave bands from 8 Hz to 630 Hz, where the double-leaf wall with insulation exhibited good agreement to the theoretical sound transmission loss profile from literature.