The objective of this research is to investigate the sound transmission loss (TL) of 7 different lightweight load-bearing calcium silicate board (CSB) partitions. By using the ASTM E90 and ISO 10140 measurement standards, the effects of testing equipment and procedure and the physical and environmental conditions of the testing chambers can be minimized and controlled.
To study the CSB layers, with the similar trends of transmission loss values, the range of sound transmission class (STC) results in 1 to 2 dB. For Rockwool displacement of ASTM 2+3 partition, there was a 1-dB STC increase when placing the insulation on the stud cavity in the receiving room side. To study the effect of test specimen size, there were 3 to 16 dB TL differences between 10.5 m2 and 1.875 m2 test specimens, and the larger test specimen has higher TL than the smaller test specimen. To study the effect of the reverberation time, to increase or decrease 1 second from the smaller specimen, the STC rating can vary from 3 to 6 dB. However, if the reverberation time decreases 4.9 seconds at 125 Hz in larger specimen, there was no effect of STC rating. Finally, to study the effect of using ASTM E90 and ISO 10140 measurement standards, there was only 1 to 3 dB TL difference. Both ASTM E413 and ISO 717-1 includes methods to calculate and report a single value of the measured sound transmission loss The rule that the total sum of the deficiencies should equal or not exceed 32 dB for their specified frequency bands are in both standards. The most important discovery of this research is that the rule of the 8-dB maximum deficiency from ASTM E413. As lightweight partition tends to have less desired TL at the lower frequency bands, the 8-dB maximum deficiency often occurred in this range. Thus, the partition with the STC rating of ASTM E413 has a more stringent sound reduction property than the RW rating of ISO 717. Thus, it is preferable for architects and acoustic consultants to use the STC rating to specify the lightweight partition for sound isolation purposes.

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