Indoor environment testing facilities

National Research Council’s (NRC) indoor environment testing facilities were built to help industry develop technologies for the design and operation of cost-effective, energy-efficient indoor environments and to optimize the comfort, satisfaction and health of building occupants.

These facilities include a flanking sound transmission test building, a fully-instrumented research house for testing heating and ventilation systems, an indoor environment test laboratory, materials emission chambers, and a daylighting test laboratory. The facilities reproduce realistic conditions and precise measurements, which yield reliable results.

Indoor air testing facility

Indoor air is negatively influenced by a number of irritants such as odour, carbon dioxide, bacteria, viruses, building materials, cleaning products, radon, ozone, pesticides, humidity, dampness, or mould, among others.

The state-of-the-art indoor air test house can generate and measure a wide-range of particles found either in homes or offices— from nano-particles to micro-particles.

The facility is flexible so it can be configured to duplicate specific room sizes and home designs, as well as simulate models of heating and air-conditioning systems, and heat-recovery ventilators. The impact of ventilation systems can be precisely monitored while documenting which systems and strategies work best to improve air quality and energy consumption.

Indoor environment facility

The indoor environment facility is NRC's largest and most flexible test space for integrated human factors testing. Within this facility, where even furnishings are installed, indoor environments can be simulated at full-scale and ventilation, lighting and acoustic conditions can be set.

The facility has a dedicated heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system to allow temperature, flow rate/pressure, and percentage of outdoor air to be selected. It also features separately dimmable lighting circuits and computer-controlled loudspeakers to create different acoustic environments. The testing area can also be subdivided to recreate smaller office spaces. The achieved conditions are monitored by a data acquisition system, housed in the control room.

Floor sound transmission testing facility

The floor sound transmission facility is one of the finest anywhere for measurement of airborne and impact sound transmission through floors.

• Room volumes - 175 m3
• Two removable floor frames
• Floor opening - 4.7 x 3.8 m
• Independent resilient support for each room and the specimen frame.
• Four loudspeakers, and a microphone moved to nine positions by computer in each room.

The rooms have volumes larger than required by standards, to improve low frequency precision. The unusual room shapes allow the floor specimen to form a whole surface of the room to reduce "aperture effects". The rooms are supported independently from each other and the specimen frame. This greatly reduces flanking transmission, which can reduce the measured sound reductions. A sound transmission class rating of 95 has been measured.

Wall sound transmission testing facility

The wall sound transmission facility is used for measurement of wall, window and door airborne sound transmission loss. The smaller room has a volume of 138 m³. The volume of the larger room is 250 m3. The large room is also used for measurement of sound absorption and sound power.

Each room is independently supported on springs. Two removable frames are used to support test specimens.

Each room is equipped with four loudspeakers to improve the uniformity of the sound field. A computer-controlled microphone is moved to nine positions to sample the fields.

The rooms have volumes larger than required by standards, to improve low frequency precision.

The rooms are supported on resilient supports to increase vibration isolation between them and the specimen frame. This greatly reduces flanking transmission, which can reduce the measured sound reductions.

NRC Construction is home to world-class testing facilities that are available to the construction industry on a fee-for-service basis. For further information:

Contact

Dino Zuppa
Telephone: 613-949-0073
Email: Dino.Zuppa@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

General Information: construction@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca