Vojtech Chmelik

Multi-Purpose Utilisation of Historic Building Glass Atrium — Case Study of the Slovak Philharmonic

This paper deals with an actual problem of covered historic building atriums in Slovakia and their adaptation to the new function concerning building physics parameters. The aim of this contribution is to quantify the parameters of the new covered atriums regarding the sound parameters. The executed measurements in selected atriums were compared with the standard values (reverberation time, flutter echo) considering their new function (cultural, social, health).

Perceived Loudness of Sound Transmitted through Light Weight and Heavy Weight Walls

When assessing the sound insulation quality of buildings constructions, policy makers and investors typically demand for single number ratings and sound insulation classes that allow for easy ranking of building products. Converting the full frequency content of a precisely measured or calculated structure into a single number, which takes into account all aspects of the insulation performance in a balanced way, is a challenging task. The recently proposed draft standard 717 proposes to take into account also frequencies below 100 Hz. This makes the single value rating even more complicated, since the transmission spectra R (dB) of walls can be qualitatively very different above and below 100 Hz, and even more, since, particularly at low frequencies, human hearing depends not only on frequency but also on the absolute sound level. This article presents a comparison between masonry and light-weight walls with different R value, in terms of the perception of loudness of typical living room, traffic noise and machinery noise transmitted through the walls. The effect of temporal and spectral features of the presented stimuli on loudness perception is analyzed.