Analysis of Reducing Heavy Impact Sound in Apartments : for Dry Floor System

Abstract

While about 60% of the population live in apartment type of dwelling in Korea, The characteristic of wall structure for apartment, inevitably causes interlayer noise. Such interlayer noise is a sensitive issue among apartment residents, with about 20,000 civil complaints per year. As a countermeasure for the interlayer noise problem, wall type structure with standard floor structure including floor heating has been used widely. While the satisfaction rate of the legal standards exceed 98% for light impact sound, only 50% of cases meets the heavy impact sound requirement. With the standard floor structure, it is difficult to obtain uniform quality due to the concrete curing process in the wet method, in addition to a problem of replacing buried heating pipes after a 15 year life cycle. Therefore, this research aims to study analyzes the tendency of the heavy impact sound of the dry floor system in the wall structure apartment, in order to examine the applicability of the dry floor system and the mitigation of the interlayer noise problem. For this purpose, reduction of heavy impact sound according to three variables (floor system, resilient material, mass) was experimented, and the correlation among such variables was confirmed by ANOVA and multiple regression. The results show that a significant difference between the three parameters was captured in the 63Hz and 125Hz bands, critical ranges for managing heavy impact sound, because of variation in structural type. According to this study, access floor system has an noticeable reduction performance of heavy impact sound, and thus heavier weight of the access floor system to which the resilient material is applied, corresponds to effective in mitigating heavy impact sound. Accordingly, the access floor system can be more effective with less mass increase than wet floor system that is attached to bare slab, In addition, the access floor system can make a positive contribution to the dry floor system, in respect to reducing interlayer noise. As a follow-up additional experiment is considering various resilient materials in the process of controlling the experimental factors.