Title: Effect of hybridisation on the acoustic response of composite laminate for prefabricated building construction

Abstract

The reduction of environmental impact (carbon and energy footprints) of building construction is increasingly becoming important. Prefabricated building construction which involves having modularized components of a building fabricated offsite in a manufacturing facility for rapid assembly onsite provides a solution to this challenge. Beyond process efficiency and cost saving gains, prefabricated building construction creates a myriad of environmental benefits, such as reduction in energy use for construction, reduction in material waste, support for adaptation-reuse-and-recycling, amongst others. Sandwich panels find application in buildings as partition/external walls and roofing panels, due to their lightweight, inherent thermal insulating characteristic and adaptable acoustic response. The construction of these sandwich panels consist of an inner and outer thin skins made from either galvanized steel, stainless steel, aluminum or glass fibre reinforced polymer (FRP). These materials are separated by a core made from either polyurethane (PU), polyisocyanurate (PIR) or rock wool, depending on functional needs: structural, thermal, acoustic and vibration behaviours, amongst others. There is need to further improve their required properties, which include lightweight, sustainability, and environmentally friendliness, in addition to the aforementioned main functional properties of buildings. Therefore, this paper investigates into the acoustic response of a hybrid sustainable composite for sandwich panel material. Test samples consisted of different volume fractions of hybrid glass/flax fibre in epoxy resin matrix system. For each set of the test samples, acoustic properties (mainly sound absorption coefficient and transmission loss) were determined based on ASTM E1050 standard, considering a plane wave impedance tube equipped with two microphones spaced at a known distance apart, and at a given distance from the test sample.

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