Prediction and evaluation of impact sound transmission in apartment building structures by statistical energy analysis (SEA)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact sound transmission in apartment building structures with a shear wall structural system, using statistical energy analysis (SEA). For this purpose, first we carried out measurements on the laboratory model room made of very simple rectangular structures. Then as a practical application, we analyzed the effect of in-plane waves on the real building structures with a shear wall structural system, which is representative of residential building construction and accounts for over 85% of total housing constructed in Korea today. In the SEA model, all couplings between bending, longitudinal and transverse (so called “in-plane”) waves were considered. The results show that the predicted values, in general, were in good agreement with the measured values. The impact sound level in the laboratory model room and the acceleration levels in the 48 subsystems of the real building gave an average variation of 0.7 and 2.3 dB, respectively. And in the case that the transmission path involved long distance and several junctions, it was found that the effect of in-plane waves on the SEA model was significant at high frequencies.