Experimental and Numerical Acoustic Characterization of Laminated Floors

This work has focused on characterizing laminated floors from the sound perception perspective. There are two main aspects in this work. The first is an alternative proposed for experimental characterization, which consists in recording the sound generated by the impact of a steel ball when it falls on a laminated floor from a known height. The second is a numerical hybrid FEM-FDTD model. The numerical model uses FEM to simulate the mechanical part of the experiment when the ball impacts the floor. The results are implemented into a FDTD algorithm to take into account the acoustic part of the problem and to obtain the sound pressure level of the microphone. This numerical model is useful for identifying laminated floors if the mechanical properties of the material are known, and to characterize them from the sound perception perspective.