Improving Indoor Acoustics Performance of Concert Halls Using Building Information Modeling

Indoor acoustics is an important issue in the design of facilities such as concert halls, lecture theaters and hospitals, which require a quiet environment. To perform acoustic analysis in the current acoustic simulation tools, 3D modeling of the facility geometry in those tools is needed, which is a time consuming process. Building information modeling (BIM) is now commonly used in the architecture, engineering and construction industry, and BIM models are usually available during the building design phase of a facility. BIM models provide 3D geometric information of a facility that can be used for acoustics simulation. However, BIM models are not supported directly by the current acoustic simulation tools. This paper presents a framework that integrates BIM models with acoustics simulation tools for evaluating the acoustic performance of concert halls. First, geometric information, speaker location and material information of decoration at the surrounding walls were extracted from BIM models and transformed into a file format that can be used directly by acoustic simulation tools. A plug-in was developed to automatically map decoration materials to acoustic absorption coefficients for walls in the simulation tools. Then, acoustic simulations with different architectural designs, speaker locations, and wall decoration materials were conducted to study how indoor acoustics performance was affected by examining the reverberation time, which is a major indoor acoustic evaluation criterion. Finally, the simulation results were compared with the data manually collected from a real case. A concert hall and its BIM model were taken as an example in this paper. The results show that the simulation result of reverberation time is only within 5% discrepancy from the actual time that is manually measured, but the data collection time is reduced by 75% compared with the time for simulations using the developed BIM-based framework.