In-situ Determination of Absorption Coefficients in a Room

The possibility is investigated of determining the diffuse absorption coefficients of the wall surfaces in a real room by minimizing the errors between the measured energy impulse response of a real room and the predicted energy impulse responses obtained from the ray tracing simulation of the room. In other words, this can possibly serve as a basis for "acoustical system identification" in attempting to determine the "best fit" of modelled absorption coefficients to measured energy response data. Algorithms for attempting this were investigated. The algorithms developed for this purpose proved to be rigorous and efficient. Instead of using the ray tracing model to determine the absorption coefficients, the phase image model was used in order to determine the acoustic impedances of wall surfaces. However, the numerical algorithms could not find the correct impedance values, primarily due to the wide range of the acoustic impedance values of any single acoustic material and very long computation time.