Acoustic Textiles - the case of wall panels in home environment

Abstract: Abstract Noise has become an increasing public health problem and has become serious environment pollution in our daily life. This indicates that it is in time to control and reduce noise from traffic and installations in homes and houses. Today a plethora of products are available for business, but none for the private market. The project describes a start up of development of a sound absorbing wall panel for the private market. It will examine whether it is possible to make a wall panel that can lower the sound pressure level with 3 dB, or reach 0.3 s in reverberation time, in a normally furnished bedroom and still follow the demands of price and environmental awareness. To start the project a limitation was made to use the textiles available per meter within the range of IKEA. The test were made according to applicable standards and calculation of reverberation time and sound pressure level using Sabine’s formula and a formula for sound pressure equals sound effect. During the project, tests were made whether it was possible to achieve a sound classification C on a A-E grade scale according to ISO 11654, where A is the best, with only textiles or if a classic sound absorbing mineral wool had to be used. To reach a sound classification C, a weighted sound absorption coefficient (αw) of 0.6 as a minimum must be reached. The project resulted in that it is technical possible to achieve a sound classification C with only textiles even though for this project another combination was chosen for proceeding with the calculations, because of account to price and environmental awareness. The calculations showed that it is possible to lower the reverberation time to 0.3 s in a normally furnished bedroom with 7 wall panels, and to achieve a lowering of the sound pressure level with 3dB with 7 wall panels. This project showed promising results and leave openings for further research with only textiles and further calculations where more factors are taken under consideration to get more precise and reliable results.