Calculation of sound in workrooms to support noise control and acoustic optimization

The calculation of sound emission and propagation inside rooms has become an important tool in the planning phase of workrooms with noisy installations like machinery where hearing loss effects shall be avoided and of offices where intelligibility, discretion and disturbance are effects shall be optimized or avoided. Due the importance of noise prediction in working areas these newer techniques shall be integrated in the existing standardization framework according to the state of the art. A main application the calculation of noise in working areas with machinery. The technique including the modeling of sources representing even complex machines is demonstrated with practical examples. The calibration to adapt the radiation to known measurement results or to emission values declared by the manufacturer is supported by the simulation of the standardized measurement techniques according to the ISO 3740-series. Taking into account the impulse response of rooms energetically it is also possible to include the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments by calculating the speech transmission index STI. The best practice is shown with some typical examples based on industrial environments.