Research Information System
4th European Congress on Acustics, Forum Acusticum 2005, Budapest, Hungary, 29 August - 02 September 2005, pp.2121-2125
Due to bad planning and poor construction of buildings, sound insulation is a very important problem in Turkey. Although it is one of the most disturbing pollution effects, noise pollution is one of the most ignored one at the same time. Because the effects of noise pollution are not distinct as the others, in other words they are indirect. So, the community is not aware of its bad effects. This fact causes insufficiencies in noise abatement and may be the one of the most important reasons that Turkey does not have satisfactory standards about noise control and sound isolation. Such difficulties in noise control make the building components more important to obtain places, which have acoustical comfort conditions. The aim of this paper is discussion of the sound insulation values for walls, which are adopted by different countries, and evaluation of these criteria from the point of Turkey's conditions. There are no sound insulation criteria for building elements in Turkey. So, the criteria from different countries, which will be seen as a table in the paper, are used to evaluate walls that can be built in Turkey. But, when we look at the foreign countries' building regulations, we can see that criteria, which a building element should achieve, can be different from country to country. Because of insufficient laboratory conditions to do a number of tests and get sound insulation values for different types of walls, calculation method has to be preferred to find out sound reduction value. Then, the wall constructions, which are used in Turkey widely, are examined, to see if their sound insulation performances are lower than the criteria or not. There is also another important criterion for selecting a wall construction in developing countries: "Cost". So, costs of the wall constructions are evaluated as a criterion.