CHARACTERIZATION OF POROUS ACOUSTIC MATERIALS APPLIED TO LIGHTWEIGHT PARTITION WALLS

Abstract: The increased need to save material and energetic resources, allied with a growing concern on the environmental issues and incertitude on the evolution of the economy, has impelled minimalist-approaches to Architecture and Engineering, reducing to the minimum necessary expression the building elements. The development of new lightweight materials, most of them composites with fibrous reinforcement systems, has interest for building materials and textile industries. However, these materials still do not have a significant implementation in the building industry or, at least, this implementation is not being made exploring all their potentialities. Non load bearing interior partition walls are thin elements built to divide the indoor space into rooms or other compartments. Porous materials applied in interior partition walls have a significant importance in these building elements because sound insulation is an important requirement. Walls must provide an airborne sound barrier between rooms in a same dwelling and especially between different dwellings, this last issue as a compulsory requirement to fulfil in Portuguese regulations. In the present study it will be considered a lightweight interior partition wall composed by insulation material and layered within two membranes. The process of selecting materials for that interior partition wall is a challenging task. This paper intends to compare results of functional (acoustic and thermal) performance of materials such as expandable polystyrene (EPS), polyurethane foam (PU), Ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), 3D warp knitted polyester fabrics (3DWK)