Durham Lab

The Durham Hall Lab is located in Durham Hall at Virginia Tech and consists of an anechoic chamber, two reverberant chambers and two general work areas.

Anechoic Chamber

The anechoic chamber is presently being used to characterize actuators developed at VAL, to test new active control strategies on fundamental sound generating structures, such as plates and cylinders and to study head related transfer functions. Tests on turbofan inlet noise have also been recently carried out. The focus of this facility is on deterministic, free-field radiation studies.

Reverberant Chamber

The reverberant chambers are used to characterize the acoustic performance of machines and structures under a diffuse sound radiation field. The response is usually random and non-deterministic. The reverberant chambers can also be used to measure the acoustic transmission of panels and other structures excited by random, non-deterministic sound fields. The reverberant chambers are presently being used to study new active control strategies to reduce sound transmission through planar structures as well as active skins for sound radiation control. The focus of the work in this facility is on random, diffuse sound fields.

General Work Area

The general work area is usded for measuring acoustic and structural impedance of porous media that are currently being used to develop advanced noise control blankets for rocket payload fairings. Along with a large number of transducers and data acquisition systems, the lab also has dedicated workstations for both processing of experimental data and numerical simulation. For partial implementation of active control systems, the lab has 2 C40, a M67 and Q67 DSP boards. These are used for implementing a functional feedforward and for development of new control strategies.