Prediction of the acoustical environment of open-plan offices.

Open plan office users complain of two annoyances due to noise. The first annoyance is the lack of concentration and the second annoyance is the reduction of the confidentiality of conversations. The rapid prediction of the acoustic work environment in open plan offices would give the possibility to optimize the acoustic comfort of the users during the design phase of the construction.
To begin with, the ray-tracing simulation program ICARE has been validated by comparisons with a boundary elements method (BEM) in the case of a single point source located at different positions in a small room. In a second step, the results provided by ICARE have been compared to the measurements performed in real open-plan offices. Different criteria such as the spatial decay rate DL2 or the speech transmission index STI recommended by the NF EN ISO 3382:3 standard have been simulated. This work is done in the frame of the MEPAS project, a common 2-year project between INRS and CSTB funded by ANSES, which aims at developing a rapid calculation method for the prediction of open plan office acoustics.