The use of damping to reduce the contribution of flanking paths to sound transmission in buildings

The importance of flanking paths to sound transmission in buildings has been studied recently. Damping treatments make it possible to increase the internal losses in structures and provide an opportunity to enhance the attenuation of long transmission paths. A number of numerical comparisons have been made to demonstrate the effectiveness of a global increase in structural damping of nine different physical systems using both bending only and three-wave models. Statistical energy analysis (SEA) has been adopted as the analytical framework. The results show that, by applying a damping treatment, the contribution of flanking paths to sound transmission can be reduced and sound insulation improved. (C) 2016 Institute of Noise Control Engineering.