There seemed to be a stretch of time from the 1960’s to the 80’s when acoustics were somewhat forgotten in the design of some buildings. We’ve all been in the motel rooms, B & Bs, flats and hotels where you hear far too much of your neighbours’ activities especially at 1am when you’ve got the important meeting next day.
The same was true of large echoey gyms, school halls, noisy factories that are far too noisy inside thanks to the prevalence of hard surfaces and total lack of absorptive surfaces. Fortunately the solution in this case is a relatively easy one, and has been widely and effectively applied in the more recent past.
Providing the construction uses metal decking, the profiles can be specified with perforated webs, which are installed with rock fibre insulation in the flutes behind the perforations. This provides between 10% to 30% open absorptive area, which is effective at damping reverberation noise. If metal cladding is also used, the same solution can be applied to the walls.
Occasionally there is a small reduction in the structural capacity of the deck of course but this can easily be designed in. The roof construction also requires more care in the specification and placement of insulation and vapour control layer, to ensure that no interstitial condensation takes place. These are relatively minor issues both in terms of cost and complexity.
Panels and Profiles in co-operation with Rockwool offer two fully tested acoustic deck systems in their Roof Deck Literature using D60 deck, which can simply be used by the building designer to meet acoustic requirements where their is a specific required acoustic aspect to a project.
[...] a potential trade-off between the conflicting requirements for controlling sound reduction and sound absorption. Sound reduction refers to the control of either internal or external noise in a [...]