A computationally efficient method for evaluating impact sound insulation for custom concrete floor geometries

Advanced construction technologies are creating opportunities to design and fabricate non-traditional concrete structural geometries. While removing structurally unnecessary material can aid in sustainability efforts, it can also reduce a structure’s ability to attenuate impact sound. An assessment of the impact sound insulation performance of custom concrete floors has often been excluded from previous studies because of the large computational cost for simulating radiated sound at high frequencies. In response, this paper presents a hybrid, computationally efficient method to approximate the impact sound performance of floors by strategically using the air-hemisphere method for a subset of low frequencies, while relying on the structure’s radiation efficiency at higher frequencies. This method improves upon existing strategies to discretize the receiving side of the floor for impact sound performance. To demonstrate this method, six anthropometric walking paths are simulated on four non-traditional floor geometries and three conventional floor slabs. The simulated results are compared to experimentally obtained dynamic behavior for the custom slabs and full-scale tests of impact sound for the conventional slabs. The proposed method is much more efficient than maintaining high resolution discretization across all frequencies, leading to significant computational time savings. Efficient simulations for determining the impact sound insulation of non-traditional structures may further enable the design of novel floor geometries, potentially accelerating their implementation in buildings.