Caracterização e avaliação de divisórias acústicas parciais: estudo experimental em escritório de planta livre

Abstract

Offices are long-stay environments where activities that demand a high level of concentration and cognitive activity are carried out and, therefore, deserve special attention in relation to environmental comfort. Among the factors that influence environmental conditions, the impact caused by high noise levels and lack of acoustic privacy is one of the most relevant in work environments, causing fatigue, stress and decreased productivity. The architectural design is directly related to the acoustic quality of offices. In shared work environments such as open-plan offices, where tasks that demand different levels of privacy and concentration are performed simultaneously, the implementation of a set of architectural solutions that fulfill distinct and complementary functions is essential for the acoustic conditioning of these environments. Researches show that offices that do not have acoustic screens have a low spatial decay rate of speech sound level and a high level of speech intelligibility, resulting in excessively noisy environments with little privacy. That said, the aim of this experimental study is to characterize and evaluate the efficiency of acoustic screens in the acoustic conditioning of open-plan offices. For this purpose, an experimental program was developed consisting on designing and producing acoustic screens, determining their sound absorption capacity through laboratory tests (ISO 354:2003 and ISO 20189:2018) and analyzing their influence on the parameters and descriptors used for evaluating the acoustic quality of open-plan offices through measurements carried out in 3 different room configurations, with and without the presence of screens (ISO 3382-3:2022 and ISO 22955:2021). The results obtained in the proposed experimental program indicate that the screens provided an increase in the spatial decay rate of speech sound level and a reduction in the reverberation time of the room. However, the lack of adequate acoustic treatment on the surfaces of the room limited the effect of the screens and did not allow the desired results for the acoustic qualification of the office to be achieved.