Acoustic Comfort and Liveability of Spaces

Acoustic comfort, together with comfort termico and visual comfort, are among the fundamental factors that define the living well-being and liveability of spaces and the sound-absorbing fabrics used by Solaris Tende allow light to enter the environment ensuring correct management of brightness and sound even in large room, such as restaurants, meeting rooms, auditoriums, open space offices, exhibition and sports centers, canteens, spaces for call centers.

An acoustically comfortable space is a space that improves our quality of life, in working circumstances to maintain concentration, in spaces intended for events that require particular standards and in living spaces that protect us and welcome us at the end of the day. In fact, the damage caused by sound is not only hearing damage and psychic, neurovegetative and auditory damage that are risked in the most serious cases to frequent and high intensity exposure, but also fatigue and sleep disturbance as well as incorrect perception of other sounds in certain facilities.

Before designing the specific solution to improve acoustic comfort inside a building, it is necessary to understand and keep in mind the different types of noises that coexist, how they behave when they propagate inside the space under consideration and the sources that generate them. Noises can be external and internal, they can come from systems but also from a simple footfall, and each of them has a different frequency useful to better manage the design of the solution.

Sound-absorbing and sound-insulating Acoustic Blinds

Blinds perform the double function of acoustic insulation, blocking the sounds from the outside, and acoustic treatment, reducing echoes and reverberations inside and an acoustic blind usually allows to reduce between 5 and 18 db. Solaris Tende's proposals are sound-absorbing (the noise is absorbed by the materials that compose it) or sound-insulating (the noise is reflected and rejected) and are presented using fireproof and printable fabrics with dimensional stability and exceptional resistance that allow the sound to pass through the holes without going back thus avoiding reverberation and improving acoustic comfort by absorbing up to 45% of noise with 100 mm air blind. 

Our polyester fabrics with woven and heat-bonded PVC coated thread used for sound-absorbing applications will be chosen based on color preferences and type of blind. The coefficient used to evaluate the sound absorption capacity of a surface or fabric is Alfa Sabine, a value ranging from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 1.

Sabine's formula tells us that the reverberation time is inversely proportional to the amount of sound-absorbing material installed in the space and directly proportional to its surface. Therefore a more voluminous environment will have longer reverberation times and vice versa the presence of surfaces with sound-absorbing properties will decrease this parameter precisely because the elements present - which can be furniture, walls but also people - condition the acoustic propagation, absorbing the sound energy that affects on them in different quantities.