ACOUSTIC COMFORT IN YACHTS: MEASUREMENTS WITH ACOUSTIC CAMERA

Shipowners have become more sensitive to noise issues, leading to consider acoustic comfort as an important parameter in the design of private boats. In the last years, manufacturers have been requested more attention to the living environments of leisure ships. Especially for luxury vessels, it has been seen that only the respect of the acoustic limits for the health safety of the crew, does not imply a good quality of life on board. Some naval country agencies have developed criteria based on the acoustic indexes used for the buildings, having in mind the different scopes of the various environments. Unfortunately, a common international line has still not been defined. The present work reports the analysis of data acquired with an acoustic camera in the process of the acoustic comfort evaluation of a 50 m long yacht. Due to the cabins' dimensions, the measurements were performed with an antenna of 0.28 m radius. This allowed the localization of noise with a Beamforming technique in the frequency range higher than 1 kHz. Its main use has been to localize different "sound leakage" routes that could compromise noise insulation mitigation.