Challenges in sound insulation of wooden buildings

Prof. Jonas Brunskog, PhD

Adequate sound insulation is important in buildings due to legal, comfort and health reasons, the latter emphasized by WHO. The sound insulation of a single homogenous wall is mainly given by the mass per unit area, the mass law, leaving not much room for improve­ment. Economic pressure as well as environmental demands of increased use of wood in buildings leads to reduced weight, which thus might resulting in poor sound insulation. However, there are also certain aspects that talk in favor for the use of wood constructions. In his lecture, Dr. Brunskog will review the acoustic challenges and possibilities when building with timber constructions. Timber constructions are used in both old traditional floor constructions in many countries, and in new innovative buildings with high sound insulation. Most traditional as well new timber floor constructions are spatially periodic, which will lead to periodic effects such as pass- and stop bands. In other areas of physics and engineering, such aspects are used as metamaterials. Another branch of constructions where innovative ideas are needed and are being used are CLT constructions.

About the speaker
Dr. Jonas Brunskog is Associate Professor at the Acoustic Technology group at the Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a co-author of 55 scientific journal articles, and more than 110 conference publications. His works have been cited 1960 times (Google Scholar). He has supervised 10 completed PhD theses as main supervisor, and 8 as co-supervisor. Scientific focus areas are: General acoustics, Vibro-acoustics, Building acoustics, Room acoustics, Numerical acoustics, Environmental acoustics, Signal processing, and Voice research.