CEN/TC 126, Building acoustics, has created a working group, WG 11, to develop Test Codes for suspended, acoustic ceilings. WG 11 started its work about a year ago with Nils-Åke Andersson from Saint-Gobain Ecophon as convener and has now about 15 participants from around Europe. The reason doing this work is the problems with differences in measurement results from laboratories.
Such measurement results are used for the CE marking of products and the uncertainty of results leads to unfair competition and sometimes even misleading information. Test Codes are supposed to be a compliment to existing standards and shall not supersede them, but might later on be incorporated in revisions of the standards.
WG 11 has decided to focus on sound absorption measurements (EN ISO 354) to start with and will later on start up work with flanking transmission measurements (EN ISO 10848-2). There have been 3 meetings so far, where the main topics were to identify possible reasons for the uncertainty of results and to identify laboratories doing measurement for CE marking.
One scope for WG 11 is to organize RRT (Round Robin Test) with measurements according to Test Code suggestions developed. RRT will also generate data for calculation of reproducibility or standard deviation to be included in future standard revision. More than 20 European laboratories have been identified doing sound absorption measurements for CE marking and they are now invited to participate in a RRT, which is supposed to start up this autumn.
Next meeting with WG 11 is scheduled to be held directly after Euronoise in Edinburgh on October 29th.
