Presenter: Francisco Toledo
Co-Presenters: Amanda Mensch, Kristina Ames
Mentor: Alison Kwok
Oral Presentation
Major: Architecture
Privacy is an important part of everyone’s life. The focus of our research is to determine what could be done to reduce the amount of sound transmission through a wall in the resident halls. We choose to test and compare two different insulations (wool and rigid). We hypothesized that natural sheep’s wool insulation will reduce the amount of sound transmission by 50% compared to that of rigid insulation. The insulations were placed inside a reconstructed wall to resemble a section of the interior walls inside the Walton residential hall and tested in a sound control room to avoid other factors such as temperature and exterior sounds that could alter our data. We choose five activities, talking, laughing, vacuuming, playing video games, and listening to music, based on their occurrence in the halls. To record data we used a sound meter app from the apple store to determine sound penetration into the box. In our findings, we concluded that when comparing the peaks from each individual activity there was about 8 % more efficiency using wool insulation in terms of sound penetration, but in general the average peak was reduced significantly by around 10-20 decibels. From our understanding, our results make sense because wool has fibers that are able to absorb sound waves while rigid insulation is highly compact hence why is able to transmit sound in the form of energy. The significance of this project is to help university housing enhance the living environment students live in. We believe privacy is an issue when living with 70 other students. Our recommendation, based on our results, is that wool is a better soundproofing material and therefore should be used within the residential halls to provide a greater sense of privacy. University housing on campus has communicated with us that they are preparing a five year renovation plan and would love for us to present to them our findings because it would help them create the most economic and effective plan.