Improving Engineering Design Using Smart Evaluation of Indoor Acoustical Climate of Dining Places

The indoor acoustic climate of dining places often presents challenges for designers and their projects. In this type of enclosure, one of the fundamental factors determining the acoustic climate of a space is the acceptable speech reception in relation to sound alarm systems. This study discusses an index-based method for assessing the acoustic climate of dining places, such as restaurants and cafeterias, during the design process. These studies focused on the reverberation time and speech intelligibility as key parameters defining the acoustical climate. The analyses considered dining places (primarily restaurants) with different dimensions, geometries, and layouts. The method combines architectural parameters (such as volume or shape) and acoustical parameters (such as absorption or background sound) that influence the acoustical quality of dining places. The proposed method is assumed to provide a convenient evaluation of planned dining locations in terms of speech intelligibility. The method is based on the WR index parameter and serves as a functional tool for architects and designers in their initial drawings and when making design decisions. The method was verified using subjective assessments. Implementing this method provides possibilities to increase the comfort of restaurants and cafeterias and lower or avoid costs associated with improving the acoustic comfort of ready-to-use dining places.