Within the context of efficient and sustainable design of buildings a trend towards lightweight structures, e.g. timber structures is recognizable. This trend implies the necessity to be able to predict serviceability and comfort as well as sound transmission in order to fulfil building requirements. To generate reliable prediction methods a detailed understanding of the transfer of energy between building components is compulsory. This contribution focuses on the investigation of the vibroacoustic behaviour of junctions of building components e.g. between wall and ceiling. In the low frequency range the Finite Element Method (FEM) is a convenient tool to predict the vibroacoustic behaviour because the modes are in general clearly separated. In a higher frequency range the modal density increases which impedes a FEM on the one hand, but enables the application of statistical methods like the Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) on the other hand. As both techniques have a restricted validity regarding the frequency range the so called mid frequency gap results, which is examined and attempted to be closed. Therefore averaging techniques of the SEA procedure are applied in the postprocessing of the FEM to obtain an adapted “SEA-like” approach. Using this hybrid approach vibroacoustical predictions can be performed also in the mid frequency range e.g. for connections of building components in an early design phase. The application of the method, compared to a classical SEA calculation is presented.     «

Within the context of efficient and sustainable design of buildings a trend towards lightweight structures, e.g. timber structures is recognizable. This trend implies the necessity to be able to predict serviceability and comfort as well as sound transmission in order to fulfil building requirements. To generate reliable prediction methods a detailed understanding of the transfer of energy between building components is compulsory. This contribution focuses on the investigation of the vibroacous...     »