Impact Sound Insulation of Thermally Insulated Balconies

With the increasing urban densification, balconies are gaining in popularity as they improve the living quality in homes. From a technical point of view, the thermal insulation between balconies and the building’s façade is state of the art. In Germany, the most popular balcony construction is a reinforced concrete balcony, separated from the building by a thermal insulation element (TIE), which is meant to reduce the thermal energy loss and thus ensure the sustainability of intelligent buildings. The impact sound transmission from balconies, however, is a problem that has not been addressed enough to date. The paper is based on a project of the same name within the iCity research with the main goal of providing acoustic quantities, e.g. an impact sound pressure level difference, for a TIE that can be used to compare the acoustical quality of products and used to predict the impact sound pressure levels within the building using the standard EN ISO 12354-2. Experimental and numerical studies have been carried out on various ceiling-balcony mock-ups without and with TIEs, e.g. by means of experimental modal analysis and validated finite element models, respectively. These studies showed that even doubling the width of the ceiling-balcony mock-up does not change the results significantly, suggesting that the proposed test set-up is suitable for standard testing. The analysis method and results presented here are for only one test set-up with and without a TIE that underwent constructive modifications during the tests. The selected TIE shows an effective sound insulation above 400 Hz and achieves a single-number rated impact sound level difference of Δ L w ∗ ≈ 10 dB $$ \Delta {L}_{\mathrm{w}}^{\ast}\approx 10\ \mathrm{dB} $$ .