Issues in the design and validation of coupled reverberation rooms for testing acoustic insulation of building partitions

The paper presents the characteristics of the sound field in two pairs of coupled reverberation rooms, designed following the guidelines and the requirements of ISO 10140-5. The authors discuss the problem of non-requirements to ensure a satisfactory acoustic field in reverberation rooms used to sound insulation measurement at their design stage. They prove that the existing guidelines described in the standards for the geometry and construction of reverberation rooms are insufficient because in many cases they imply the need to install some additional diffusing and absorbing elements at the stage of using the rooms. Such elements, however, are very undesirable as they significantly limit the usable space of the rooms, making it more difficult to assemble samples and distribute sources and measurement points in the measurement space. Keywords: Reverberation chambers; Transmission loss; Acoustic field; Small scale model