Where are they at the ENSIACET ?
Cellular materials in ENSIACET
Our school is built with lot of cellular materials we can observe in many classrooms, lecture hall and also at the library.
To understand their utility, we looked in the school building files to know how the choice and the place of this materials had been decided.
You will find below a description of a few of them that you can easily see at school.
For exemple, the lecture theatre 300 is mainly constituted of plasterboard with holes of 1 and 2 centimeters diameter. We find this material both on the ceiling and on a part of the walls, as show the picture bellow.
Plaster is a very porous and soundproofing material. Having the lecture theatre made of plasterboard with holes provides the material a macro and a microscopic porosity that make it absorb a wide range of sound waves to reduce the overall noise in the room.
We find also wooden plates with more smaller holes of 1 centimeter diameter as you can see on the picture just above.
In class room, where you have less people, we find false ceilings which have also the ability to absorb sound. This ceiling is composed by removable glass wool plates covered with a thin plaster layer. Each plate is a square whith a 60 cm side and a thickness of 2 cm.
As this material is quite easy to get, we have studied it more accurently watching it with an optical microscope, a binocular microscope and the SEM.
As we can see on the picture, the glass wool is cellular material that occupies almost the entire plate. We deduce that ceiling plates has a thermal insulation function.
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Generally, these cellular materials are made for the classrooms acoustic insulation. Their shape and composition depend on the room size. Indeed, the more people there are inside, the more the material have to be soundproofing to make the speaker being heard.
These materials were choosen also for an esthetic point to give the school a modern aspect. Some of them iare made to be easily removed like the false ceiling plates which hide pipes that must be accessible for maintenance.
