An update on acoustics designs for HVAC (Engineering)

Ken Marriott

A person’s sense of comfort and their capacity for work and/or their appreciation of leisure activities deteriorate quickly in poor air conditions. More seriously, a person’s general health may be impaired in the long term by being subjected to ill-ventilated buildings and enervating climates. The relevant factors to be considered are temperature, relative humidity and air circulation. The main function of the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) engineer is to engineer ways for keeping these factors under control. To produce suitable air changes and cooling within an occupied space entails the need to induce and control airflows which is always associated with some level of noise. This noise can in some cases be just as unacceptable as poor ventilation in as far as it affects the capacity to work and/or concentrate. This paper looks at a set of five typical design cases that arise and methods that can be applied in achieving the HVAC engineer’s environmental requirements while minimising noise generated in the process considering standard methods and more recent techniques used in the design of acoustic measures.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Ken Marriott. An update on acoustics designs for HVAC (Engineering). Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811400⟩