Acoutect organized a set of training activities for the ESRs in the form of four summer schools and transferable skills courses. Additionally, Acoutect has organized seven research and demonstrator workshops where the ESRs have periodically presented their progress. The summer schools combined scientific and industrial contents. The main topics of the training activities have been:
- Modern sustainable building concepts
- Drivers and barriers in building concepts
- Teambuilding, leadership and communication
- Building Acoustic prediction methods
- Modern Acoustic consultancy practices
- Presentation skills
- Career orientation and business start-up, entrepreneurship and ethics
- Innovative acoustic materials
- Product development
- Human-related evaluation techniques
- Applied research
The results of Acoutect have been disseminated mainly by scientific communication (peer-review journals or international congresses). There have been 9 scientific peer-review publications and 37 international congress communications from Acoutect researchers. A second mechanism to transfer the research results to a wide audience has been the Acoutect Demonstrators (see the demonstrators' booklets at the project website). Additionally, the Acoutect YouTube Channel is a collection of videos made by the ESRs, presenting current issues on building acoustics. In the channel, they have covered some of the essential concepts of acoustics in the context of building and room acoustics.
Each ESR in Acoutect has carried out an individual research project, most of them towards obtaining a PhD degree. The Research Coordination Group (RCG) monitored periodically the research activities of the ESRs through online meetings organized and moderated by the research WP leaders. During the periodic online meetings the ESRs presented their research progress to the other research WP members promoting cross collaborations.
Work package 4: Design
Within WP4, scientifically followed up by University of Liverpool, the work concerns:
• Hybrid temporal models of the acoustics in open plan spaces.
• Finite difference time domain models for room acoustics and sound insulation.
• Modelling structure-borne sound transmission in lightweight buildings.
• Prediction models for rolling noise in buildings.
• Accurate characterization of materials based on in situ measurements combined with modelling.
Work package 5: Products
Within WP5, scientifically followed up by KU Leuven, the work concerns:
• Develop multifunctional material systems with a focus on façades.
• Development of lightweight and compact solutions for building noise and acoustics problems.
• Validation of time and cost efficient identification approaches to feed CAE models.
Work package 6: Evaluation
Within WP6, scientifically followed up by Aalto University, the work concerns:
• Understand human response to low frequency noise inside housing.
• Invent and construct novel measurement and auralization techniques to study building acoustics.
• Subjectively evaluate floor impact sounds in lightweight buildings.
• Assess the acoustic quality in Life Cycle Assessment as a basis for building certification systems.
• Implement binaural synthesis using Advanced Ray Tracing for moving source or listener.
Work package 7: Demonstrators
The Demonstrators brought together all the different aspects of the project by implementing a holistic approach to solve real-life building acoustic problems. Four demonstrators were defined within the following main topics:
• Lightweight constructions.
• Open plan spaces.
• Multi-story buildings.
• Places for social gathering.
The results of the demonstrators is published on scientific conferences and is made public via booklets at the Acoutect website (
http://www.acoutect.eu(opens in new window))
