A pilot study on the sound insulation performance of plenum doors

Demands for natural ventilation is inaugurated recently, particularly after the COVID-19 outbreak. Various ventilating windows have been proposed, one of which a plenum window has been studied for these years. Since the COVID outbreak shops and restaurants often leave doors opened for ventilation reasons during their business hours. However, by this, the indoor sound environment is suffered by incoming noises from streets. Therefore, it is desirable that a sound insulation structure enabling natural ventilation is developed. In this study, we propose a door with plenum structure which is an application of the same principle of plenum windows to a door. Doors and windows are of different sizes, and under different conditions. Therefore, in this paper, as a pilot study, we employed finite element method to analyse the sound insulation characteristics of a plenum door. Results show that a plenum door, although its sound insulation is not very high, shows sound insulation performance to a certain extent. Also, a parametric study is given to show the effect of parameters including that of sound absorption linings.