Proceedings of the 11th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum / EuroNoise 2025


Málaga, Spain
June 23 - 26, 2025





Session: A03.07 Acoustics of wooden buildings
Date: Wednesday 25 June 2025
Time: 14:40
Title: Sound insulation performance of timber floors with elastically mounted and suspended layers
Author(s): Jesse Lietzén
Lauri Talus
Alina Lahdensivu
Aitor Lopetegi
Ander Aldalur
Pages: 567-575
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2025.0787
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2025/data/articles/000787.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Massive timber buildings are often equipped with concrete or cement screed floors to increase the mass of the structures and to improve the sound insulation between rooms. However, the use of concrete is more and more often seen as an unfavourable option due to the increasing need to decrease the carbon dioxide emissions of the construction sector. A recent field study performed in a mock-up CLT-framed building showed that the sound insulation can drastically be improved without concrete by mounting the upper layers of the floor and the suspended ceiling elastically to the load-bearing timber slabs. In comparison with the conventional screed solution, the vertical airborne and impact sound insulation was improved with the elastically mounted floor up to 13 and 20 dB in terms of the single-number quantities DnT,w and L’nT,w. This study aims to investigate the sound insulation performance of the conventional and elastically supported floors by conducting computational assessments which were compared with the field measurement results. Furthermore, the assessments were broadened to study the sound insulation between rooms in the horizontal direction. These computations based on FEM and parametric models reveal the superior performance of the elastically mounted floor both in horizontal and vertical directions.