Design of small reverberation room and measuring the sound absorption and transmission characteristics of acoustic materials

Determining the acoustical properties of acoustic materials, which are used to change the acoustical response of the environment, play an important role in automotive and architectural applications. In architecture, they are specially designed and selected in order to meet certain criteria in conference and concert halls and studios. Whereas in automotive industry, they are widely used to meet interior noise level targets. Especially in automotive industry, due to high comfort demand of the customers and the costs associated with these parts, it is very important to correctly select and size the material used. In order to determine these properties, there are standardizised and non- standardizised methods. Non- standardizised methods include small reverberation rooms which are one of the highly preffered ones because they provide minimal space requirements, modularity options, cost efficiency and component level testing possibilities. In this thesis, a small reverberation room (also called alpha cabin) is designed and manufactured. During the development process, several iterations have been done to understand the effect of different parameters on material properties. In order to automate the tests and process the results, a software code was developed in Python and Qt. After the completion of the cabin, different materials were tested for absorption and sound transmission loss properties and compared against a reference Rieter cabin and the results were evaluated.