Grant: Engage Grants Program

Noise transmission within building structures is becoming one of the major issues that face urban development in recent years. Noise can be transmitted between adjacent spaces either through direct or indirect paths. The direct transmission paths include walls and/or floor separating the rooms. However, indirect transmission paths involve more than just the separating elements between the rooms and in such case the noise transmitted is referred to as flanking noise. The flanking paths provide mediums or routes for the air vibrations to escape or leak from a certain enclosure and reach another one. Thus, the flanking noise can be either air-borne or structure-borne. The air-borne transmission paths can be through doors or windows gaps, electrical outlets, services pipes and ducts while the structure-borne can be diffusive through steel frames, gypsum boards, or concrete slabs. Most of the efforts done in sound insulation are focused on the reduction of direct soundtransmission by installing high performance walls between the noise source and the receiver. However, since the flanking noise takes indirect paths, it become very difficult to predict or control and thus, very difficult to insulate. Moreover, it is clear from the previous work in this field that there is a need for an improved method that can be used in-situ to accurately localize flanking noise sources in concrete and composite multilayered structures. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to investigate the flanking noise transmission in concrete and multilayered structures and develop an innovative in-situ localization technique that can be used to effectively detect and eliminate the flanking noise sources/paths.