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Beam-tracing prediction of room-to-room sound transmission

University of British Columbia

Modeling sound transmission is a challenging task. An existing beam-tracing model for empty, parallelepiped rooms with specularly-reflecting surfaces is extended to predict room-to-room sound transmission between a source and receiver rooms separated by a common wall. This wall is modeled as one locally-reacting homogenous partition with frequency-independent transmission loss. Besides, sound transmission is modeled in Ray-Tracing (CATT-TM) and FEM (COMSOL). A reference configuration consists of two identical reverberation rooms is chosen following the recommendations of the literature and most of the prescriptions of the reverberation room standard, ASTM 3423. The capability of various room-to-room predictions models, in particular, the phase and energy-based beam tracing models (PBTM, EBTM) in reproducing the results of the diffuse-field theory is investigated. Both EBTM and CATT-TM are found to be reasonably accurate in reproducing the diffuse sound field for a reverberation room (i.e. for diffuse sound fields). However, the predicted levels deviate considerably from the diffuse-field theory with changes in the acoustical characteristics of the room (room aspect ratio, the magnitude of the surface absorption and surface absorption distribution (i.e. for non-diffuse sound fields). EBTM has been validated in both source and receiver rooms through existing results from ODEON in the literature and by comparing the prediction results with the new CATT-TM for the reference configuration. PBTM has been compared with finite element method (COMSOL) results in the low-frequency region. Both phase-based models match well in source room with a reasonable discrepancy. However, the PBTM has not reproduced the sound field predicted by COMSOL in the receiver room. Moreover, Waterhouse effect is studied by both PBTM and EBTM model in the reverberation rooms which is ignored in the classical diffuse-field concept. However, its significant effect is exhibited near the reflecting boundaries inside the reverberation room only in the PBTM predictions. Hence, based on recommendations of the ASTM standards during measuring sound transmission between rooms, sources and receivers should be placed sufficiently far away from the reflecting surfaces, edges and corners of the rooms to avoid the errors due to the Waterhouse effect.

Text

2017-12-22

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/64154

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/