Anechoic Chamber

The Duke University Anechoic Chamber is located in the basement of Hudson Hall in room 029J.

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anechoic chamber

Constructed in 1994 by Willam Clayton, the chamber offers an acoustically isolated testing facility with highly absorptive walls for students and faculty to use. The anechoic ("an-echoic" meaning non-echoing) properties of the chamber allow for direct field measurements, simulating free-space and thus minimizing the reverberant field found in real world environments.

Sound absorption is achieved through the soft foam wedges and thick dissipative foam located along the chamber wall. Incident acoustic waves become trapped within the porous foam structure and converted into small amounts of heat that then dissipate behind a blanket of condensed fiberglass. The absorption process is most efficient at higher frequencies while experiments have shown near anechoic properties down to around 300 Hz.  

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anechoic foam

The chamber at Duke is fully anechoic (absorptive floor) and features a mesh floor grating for supporting equipment. Threaded rods are conveniently mounted onto the ceiling for hanging sound sources that can rotate through a stepper motor adapter, allowing for the testing of speaker directivity patterns. Electrical outlets are located on all four side walls along with a small window for feeding cables outside the room. The dimensions of the chamber are 9x12.5x7.5 ft high. For more information or to check availability, please contact us at donald.bliss@duke.edu.

References:

Beranek, Leo L. and and Harvey P. Sleeper Jr. "The Design and Construction of Anechoic Sound Chambers." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 18. 140 (1946).