Refurbishing the Anechoic Room: Part 2

The refurbishment of the Large Anechoic Chamber started in April, and we published an article on LinkedIn. That covered the removal of the old wedges to revel the bare chamber, last seen in 1996. Here's the latest installment, part 2, as the refurbishment continues apace.

The next stage was to start fitting some gripper rails to the ceiling...

...and then some more...

... and in case you were wondering, there is a removable (but very heavy, solid) plug in the centre of the ceiling with a hoist above for lifting heavy kit, though I have never seen it used.

New wedges began to arrive and were temporarily stored in the adjacent 'Rev Room'...

...before being fitted in the ceiling, held in place by the gripper rails.

More wedges arrived by the lorry load...

... and were unloaded using our forklift truck

Gripper rails were fitted to the walls, and more wedges were installed...

A new support ring for a wire trampoline floor was installed in sections, just below the existing floor grids...

... and this was extended in sections around all four walls of the chamber.

To accommodate all potential uses of the room, from academic research to consultancy work, the plan is to install a trampoline floor, with a removable load-bearing floor above it. The load-bearing floor will be made of removable panels similar to the existing grid panels, but made of light-weight GRP not metal. The load bearing floor will be supported by poles fitted through the trampoline floor, and like the existing floor, be at the same level as the floor in the corridor for level access. The load-bearing floor will also be covered over when standard tests demand a 'free-field over a reflecting plane' or hemi-anechoic conditions.

The University electrician visited to install more lights, to compensate for the new wedges being darker than the old ones. More wedges were added, and the chamber began to look like more like an anechoic room.

The new wedges are slightly longer than the old ones, 1.2 m instead of 3 ft (yes, 3 ft or 0.92 m if you insist) which will extend free-field conditions down to a slightly lower frequency. The new wedges are a quarter wavelength at 71 Hz; the old wedges were a quarter wavelength at 92 Hz. The tip-to-tip dimensions between the wedges in the room will be a little smaller. The old wedges were 20 cm square, the new ones are 30 cm square at the 'flat end'.

The letters 'ISVR' will be picked out in blue wedges on the wall opposite the main entrance to the chamber...

... but that's as far as we have got. To be continued....

Our website shows details of the Large Anechoic Chamber before refurbishment and will be updated when the work is complete.

The refurbishment is being undertaken by IAC Acoustics UK.

Thanks to John Fithyan, our Laboratory Manager, for sharing this selection of photographs. We expect the anechoic and reverberant chambers to be restored to normal use around the end of May or beginning of June.

#isvrconsulting?#isvr?#anechoic?#universityofsouthampton