Impact sound insulation: Transient power input from the rubber ball on locally reacting mass-spring systems

© 2016, German Acoustical Society (DEGA). All rights reserved. For heavy impacts in heavyweight buildings, impact sound insulation is measured using the rubber ball but little is understood about the interaction of the rubber ball with a floating floor. This paper describes experimental work to investigate idealised floating floors using a steel plate on different resilient materials to represent a locally-reacting mass-spring system. Force plate measurements show that there are two characteristic force-time pulses from the mass-spring systems, a single and double hump for low and high stiffness springs respectively. These trends are shown to occur with a mass-spring model for both the rubber ball and the mass-spring system when implemented in Matlab Simulink but only with optimized material properties. With excitation from the rubber ball with and without a mass-spring system, Lv,Fmax measurements on a concrete base floor and Lp,Fmax measurements in a receiving room indicate that the change in transient power measured using the force plate and the change in Lv,Fmax or Lp,Fmax are only similar when the resilient material in the mass-spring system is dynamically stiff.