PhD on modelling room acoustics via the diffusion equation

Are you interested to further develop a numerical model to model room acoustics, to be part of
a project on open source software development together with other researchers, acoustic consultants and (software) companies? Then apply for this PhD position of the Building Acoustics group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

To avoid noise induced health effects indoors and to promote or limit indoor speech and music transmission, suitable room acoustic modelling methods are needed. The methods available to acoustic consultants via commercial software are limited and closed. In a project at TU/e, two complementary room acoustics modelling methods will be further developed and ecologically validated such that they become ready for consultancy practice. At the same time, research is conducted towards a sustainable software community around open source software, where scientists and practitioners meet to use and contribute to room acoustic prediction methods. The involvement of end users is crucial in this project. They will help to benchmark the developed modelling methods and test the prototype software of the community platform. The role of this PhD vacancy is related to further developing one of the numerical models.

Numerically solving the diffusion equation is an approach to obtain spatial distribution of acoustic energy over time in a room. This method is efficient in modeling the reverberation tail of impulse responses and is valid after two mean-free paths, which is defined as the time between two interactions of sound waves with the boundaries of the room. The diffusion equation approach is applicable to the higher frequency range. One factor that currently hampers the practical applicability is the difficulty to obtain the controlling parameters of the diffusion process for complex geometries: the diffusion coefficients and boundary conditions. This project contains contributions to the diffusion equation modelling as improvement of the diffusion coefficients, decoupling in subdomains to model large spaces, and  optimize boundary conditions. Besides these numerical developments, the code will be prepared as open source code, and validation against results from measured benchmark rooms will take place.

The building Acoustics research group (https://building-acoustics.net) belongs to the department of the built environment at the TU/e. The group provides a lively working environment and is currently made up of 15 researchers all working on a research topic related to acoustics in the built environment. The group strives to contribute to the reduction of adverse health effects caused by human-induced noise and to promote positively perceived sound environments. The research in the group revolves around developing computational and experimental methods for acoustics in the built environment, with research areas on acoustics materials, environmental acoustics, and acoustic virtual reality.