An experimental study on noise indices in air conditioned offices

Abstract An acoustical environment survey was carried out in an air-conditioned office building. A total of 52 rooms occupied by one or more workers were analysed. In this survey, we used questionnaires and physical noise measurements. The offices characteristics lead us to belive that the noise sources to be considered were only those inside each room; this means that when a room is occupied by only one person the noise of the air conditioning system prevails. Instead, when a room is occupied by more than one person, the noise generated by the office activity prevails. Our results show that some noise indices are well correlated with subjective sensations of loudness and annoyance; we found the strongest correlation for the percentile level L A90 , and the equivalent sound pressure level.