Corridor
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Corridor - The busiest room in the building
Corridors and other communicational areas have to be multi-functional. People use them to move between the different rooms in a building. Corridors are where people meet and where supplies and materials are transported. It can be said that the corridor is a building’s most frequented room.
It is what makes the first impression of the building and the activities conducted there - from the entrance right on to the conference room, the classroom or the hospital treatment room. Corridors and other communicational areas are the lifeblood of a building, where function and appearance must have priority.
Needs in school corridors
School corridors are used for breaks and relaxation but also for meetings and study since there is often a lack of fixed workstations for group work. Students and staff pass along the corridors in a steady stream, with the resulting noise disturbing lessons.
If corridors are noisy, students tend to take this high noise volume into the classrooms with them, which disrupts teaching. The acoustics in a school corridor should therefore match those of a classroom if full use is to be made of the corridor areas and adjoining rooms.
Acoustics
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Open areas encourage conversation at a distance, which results in people tending to raise their voices, trying to be heard over others. Sound breeds sound, creating a disturbing "cocktail of noise".
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Hard surface materials create problematic sound amplification and sound propagation. The sound is transported a long way and so disturbs a large number of people in adjacent classrooms.
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Hard flooring creates noisy footsteps.
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Parallel walls can create problematic flutter echoes.
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Noise, and the sound of talking, running and movement, must be restricted in corridors. You get the best sound absorption possible by making use of the whole ceiling area.
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Room Acoustic Comfort™ shows that you can benefit from many acoustic advantages if class A sound absorbers are used. There will be a reduction in sound level and less sound propagation, important particularly in corridors, which have a tendency to carry sound along their length and into adjoining rooms. Even reverberation decreases, improving speech intelligibility.
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The new parameters DL2, describing how sound fades with the distance from its source, and DLf, describing how the room contributes to the sound level in its different areas, are used to assess a room’s acoustic comfort. You can thus calculate your way to finding what acoustic measures are needed to create the desired sound environment. In narrow corridors, with the help of class A sound absorbers, the sound level (DL2) would decrease by 3–4 dB(A) per doubling of the distance. With the same treatment, the sound level (DLf) in the room will be about 7–8 dB(A) higher than it would be if this was measured out of doors, without reflecting surfaces. This indicates the existence of a good indoor sound climate, as the value involves significant sound reduction compared to a room with non-sound absorbing surfaces.
Building codes and standards
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UK Regulations Building Bulletin 93 (BB93), states: The objective is to absorb sound in corridors, entrance halls and stairwells so that it does not interfere with teaching and study in adjacent rooms. The requirement is to include additional absorption in corridors, entrance halls and stairwells. The amount of additional sound absorption should be calculated according to Approved Document E, section 7.
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Swedish Standard 02 52 68 recommends a reverberation time of 0.6 or 0.8 seconds in corridors, and 0.8 or 1.0 seconds for stairs, depending on the selected quality level. This applies to normally furnished but unoccupied spaces. The above figure is the highest recommended value for the frequency range 250 - 4,000 Hz. At 125 Hz a value 20% higher is permitted.