Architectural Acoustics: Numerical and Experimental Study of a Classroom

Abstract

The problem of room acoustics has been studied from several decades, however it has always been complicated to understand sound propagation in an enclosed space and, also, its control for better hearing. In the present work, numerical and experimental investigation of sound propagation within a three-dimensional closed space and corresponding reverberation time are carried o ut. The numerical study is also performed for one and two dimensional domains. For the numerical study, basic hyperbolic sound wave equation is discretized by finite difference technique in both time and space. Different boundary conditions for room surfaces are implemented. The developed methodology is validated for the sound propagation from fundamental sources as point source, line source, and pulsating cylinder. Reverberation time is calculated for both two dimensional and three dimensional domains and compared with the results computed from the analytical formulation. Finally, reverberation time of a classroom is measured experimentally and a comparative analysis of experimental and numerical results is discussed, which shows a reasonable matching of numerical results with the measurement.