Steel studs are used in double walls to provide structural stability. This creates a vibration transmission path between leaves that can often be more critical than the airborne path through the cavity. Some of the existing models for sound transmission consider the studs as elastic springs. The spring stiffness may be taken as the cross-section elastic stiffness of the stud, but this leads to an underestimation of the vibration transmission. A procedure to obtain more accurate parameters to be used in vibration and sound insulation models is presented. The results show that they must be obtained from dynamic models and/or experiments.

The vibration reduction index of heavy junctions is predicted by means of a model based on spectral finite elements. This is equivalent to a finite element method but faster and with smaller computational costs. This advantage is used in order to perform a parametric analysis of the vibration reduction index for several junction types: T-shaped, L-shaped and +-shaped. The influence of several parameters such as: damping, junction dimensions or the mass ratio on the vibration reduction index is observed. The study is focussed to provide data and guidelines oriented to the EN-12354 design method for flanking transmission in buildings.

Sound insulation prediction models in European and International standards use the vibration reduction index to calculate flanking transmission across junctions of walls and floors. These standards contain empirical relationships between the ratio of mass per unit areas for the walls/floors that form the junction and a frequency-independent vibration reduction index. Calculations using wave theory show that there is a stronger relationship between the ratio of characteristic moment impedances and the transmission loss from which the vibration reduction index can subsequently be calculated. In addition, the assumption of frequency-independent vibration reduction indices has been shown to be incorrect due to in-plane wave generation at the junction. Therefore numerical experiments with FEM, SFEM and wave theory have been used to develop new regression curves between these variables for the low-, mid- and high-frequency ranges. The junctions considered were L-, T- and X-junctions formed from heavyweight walls and floors. These new relationships have been implemented in the prediction models and they tend to improve the agreement between the measured and predicted airborne and impact sound insulation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The transmission of sound through slits and openings between cuboid-shaped rooms is analysed. A deterministic model that describes the pressure fields inside the rooms in terms of eigenfunctions and uses the Dirichlet-to-Neumann technique in order to reproduce the slit effect is presented. An efficient formulation of the problem is obtained thanks to the splitting of the original domain into three domains: sending room, slit, receiving room. The geometry and boundary conditions of the problem can be modelled in detail like in an element-based numerical technique (such as the finite element method) but with smaller computational costs. The model is compared with numerical solutions, existent models and published experimental data. Afterwards it is used to analyse some aspects such as the influence of slit dimensions, opening position, room properties (dimensions and absorption) that cannot be taken into account with the available models. These usually suppose that the slit or opening connects two unbounded acoustic domains.

The finite layer method (FLM) is presented as a discretisation technique for the computation of noise transmission through double walls. It combines a finite element method (FEM) discretisation in the direction perpendicular to the wall with trigonometric functions in the two in-plane directions. It is used for solving the Helmholtz equation at the cavity inside the double wall, while the wall leaves are modelled with the thin plate equation and solved with modal analysis. Other approaches to this problem are described here (and adapted where needed) in order to compare them with the FLM. They range from impedance models of the double wall behaviour to different numerical methods for solving the Helmholtz equation in the cavity. For the examples simulated in this work (impact noise and airborne sound transmission), the former are less accurate than the latter at low frequencies. The main advantage of FLM over the other discretisation techniques is the possibility of extending it to multilayered structures without changing the interpolation functions and with an affordable computational cost. This potential is illustrated with a calculation of the noise transmission through a multilayered structure: a double wall partially filled with absorbing material.