Entwicklung und Anwendung eines virtuellen Mehrzwecklabors zur Untersuchung und Optimierung multifunktionaler Wandstrukturen

A wall construction, used in civil engineering, requires not only good acoustic insulation to protect people from the harmful impact of noise exposure, but also efficient thermal insulation to minimize energy consumption. Experimental, analytical and numerical studies are usually conducted to analyze and optimize the acoustic and thermal properties of a wall structure. In general, experimental measurements are time-consuming and expensive, while analytical studies suffer from restrictions of the boundary conditions and geometry of the problem. By using appropriate numerical methods, however, all relevant physical phenomena can be included. The present work develops a virtual multipurpose laboratory, which is capable to determine the acoustic and thermal insulation of a geometrically complex wall construction. A strongly coupled fluid-structure interaction problem (FSI) in the frequency domain is solved to determine the acoustic insulation. The simulation follows the conditions of an experimental setup. Therefore, the characteristic values for the sound insulation calculated by the virtual multipurpose laboratory are comparable to experimental measurements. The heat equation is solved to estimate the thermal insulation. In the case of structures including cavities and gaps filled with air, an equivalent thermal conductivity is used. The virtual multipurpose laboratory calculates the characteristic values of the acoustic and the thermal insulation for a large number of geometry parameters of the wall structure. To increase the accuracy and speed of the calculation, the spectral element method (SEM), which is an advanced finite element method (FEM), is used. Convergence studies are conducted to analyze the efficiency of the developed SEM. The characteristic values for the acoustic and thermal insulation, which are calculated in the virtual multipurpose laboratory are verified by experimental data and compared to the characteristic values derived by other estimation methods. Examples for the use of the virtual multipurpose laboratory in the optimization procedure of wall structures are given.