Measurement of in-room impact noise reduction

There are well-established measurement standards for the rating of impact noise reduction provided by floor coverings in relation to structurally transmitted impact noise, e.g. BS EN ISO 10140-3 and ASTM E492 are widely used in Europe and North America respectively. Standardisation for “in-room” impact noise transmitted by an airborne path is however less well established. At the current time the standard used for rating the “in-room” impact sound reduction is BS EN 16205:2013 which focuses primarily on walking noise as the impact source. This standard employs the same tapping machine used for impact improvement testing in BS EN ISO 10140-3 but has been found not to be ideal due to the mechanical noise it produces and because it is not fully representative of the walking loads that the standard primarily aims to address. There is currently no standard that deals with “in room” impact noise from falling objects which may be a greater concern than walking noise, for example in a healthcare or education setting. Thus, presented in the paper are the findings from a large measurement survey conducted to investigate the influence of impactor mass, hardness and velocity on measured “in room” impact noise reductions. Other measurands such as the reduction in impact force and floor acceleration are also considered. It is discussed in the paper how ‘In-room’ impact noise differs from transmitted impact noise and this is demonstrated by performing a transfer path analysis to separate out the impact noise contributions from a falling object and from the floor. The key finding of the study is that the whilst the impact noise reduction achieved by different floor coverings varies wildly for different impactor types the rank order of the floor coverings tested in terms of Impact noise reduction did not. Thus, the ideal test method may not be the one that simulates best the type of impacts a floor is likely to be subjected to, but rather, it ought to be the one that gives the biggest differences between similar floor coverings so as to highlight most clearly the differences between them