With the development of new standards in the health care industry, design professionals will soon have additional construction criteria to ensure speech privacy in new facilities. There are currently sound transmission class (STC) ratings required for partitions in a healthcare setting outlined in the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospital and Healthcare Facilities. These currently implemented criteria have traditionally focused on patient personal privacy and not speech privacy. This effort will be a general analysis to determine the shortcomings of these standards with respect to speech privacy and a cost-privacy analysis for commonly used wall constructions. Wall constructions included in the analysis will be suitable for a healthcare setting. Commonly referenced published, modeled, and measured transmission loss across partitions will be shown. The privacy indices will be evaluated for each configuration. The talk will highlight that, in most cases, no extraordinary measures will be needed to ensure reasonable safeguards have been implemented.
Shortly after the occupation of a new hospital and medical office building, both objective and subjective evaluations of the acoustic performance of these facilities were made. The goals of this work were twofold: first, to survey the occupants’ subjective perception of the acoustic environment relative to noise, distractions, speech privacy, etc; and second, to relate the subjective perception to objective measures of noise isolation rating (NIC), background noise (dBA), and speech privacy rating (PI). Knowing the construction details of the walls, ceiling, doors, etc. also allowed a comparison of the measured NIC to the expected STC for each type of construction. In this way it was possible to identify robust architectural systems versus weak systems with inherent flanking and leakage paths.
A tour of the new ETS-Lindgren Acoustic Research Laboratory in Cedar Park, Texas will be conducted. The schedule for the day includes a technical discussion on acoustic test facilities followed by a lunch break and factory tour. As a bonus, the tour will feature demonstrations of the material presented in the technical discussion.Tour participants will see several state-of-the-art chambers for acoustic test services, including a hemi-anechoic chamber and two reverberation chambers, impedance tubes and supporting acoustic test equipment and software. The laboratory offers product noise emission testing and structural/architectural acoustic testing.Product noise emission testing is commonly performed in the double-walled hemi-anechoic chamber that is designed to measure very low noise emissions from products and devices at 80 Hz and above Outside chamber dimensions are 8.5 m long ϫ 8.5 m wide ϫ 7 m high. This chamber is ideal for testing sound power and pressure levels as well as small fan noise. Products tested include Information Technology Equipment ͑ITE͒ such as laptop computers and associated printers, home appliances, garden equipment -essentially any noise emitting device may be tested in this chamber. Commonly referenced standards for testing in this chamber include ISO 3744, SO 3745, ISO 7779, ISO 11201, and ECMA 74. Structural/architectural acoustic testing is performed in the reverberation chambers. With transmission loss testing of wall samples, windows, doors, automobile panels and the like, design engineers can determine how much sound energy is transmitted through a product in the chambers. The source chamber measures 7.4 m long ϫ 5.9 m wide ϫ 4.8 m high; the receive chamber measures 7.4 m long ϫ 9.2 m wide ϫ 6 m high. ASTM E90, ASTM C423, ASTM E596, and ISO 3741 are the most commonly referenced standards for testing in these chambers.To enhance chamber performance, the hemi-anechoic inner chamber sits on a 50 ton isolated concrete slab while the reverberation chambers sit on individual floating concrete slabs. The laboratory is ISO 17025 accredited under the US Department of Commerce NIST National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program ͑NVLAP͒ Lab Code 100286-0. The tour will also feature a stop in ETS-Lindgren's ISO 9001 certified factory. Tour participants will see how acoustic chambers are constructed.Bus loading will begin promptly at 8:00 am outside the main entrance of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, on Losoya Street. Tour participants will travel in a luxury air-conditioned motor coach for approximately 90 minute ride to Cedar Park ͑near Austin͒. The bus is equipped with bathroom facilities. Refreshments will be provided upon arrival at ETS-Lindgren. A traditional Texas Style BBQ lunch buffet will be served at noon. Snacks in the afternoon and a treat for the return bus ride to San Antonio will also be provided. The bus will depart Cedar Park by 2:30 pm for an arrival at the Hyatt Hotel before 5:00 pm, traffic permitting. Please note tour attendance is limited to 50 people and reservations will ...
A recent case study was conducted addressing excessive occupant noise within a cafeteria in a Rhode Island school. A design requirement was to retain the open structure ceiling. This paper will discuss the before and after acoustic performance and the effect it had on the occupants.
Any acoustic testing laboratory that performs the ASTM E1414 testing of ceiling attenuation class ceiling system will have experimented with a few odd cases and learned a few interesting “rules of thumb.” The Armstrong World Industries Acoustic Testing Laboratory in Lancaster, PA, has certainly had its share of those, and has learned a few things about materials and systems along the way. We would like to share these understanding about ceiling materials, grid systems, plenum stuff, etc. Test data…that is what it is all about.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.