Space Planning

The main acoustical goal should be to locate the major noise sources, mechanical equipment rooms (housing the AHU), cooling towers, chiller rooms and roof top and other package units as far as possible from noise‐sensitive areas in the building. In large buildings it is often necessary to locate the mechanical room in the core of a building. Figure 13.28 shows several possible building layouts, in which stairs, toilets, elevators, and storage rooms are used to separate the mechanical room from noise‐sensitive areas of the building. In the layout at the top, three walls of the mechanical room are potentially connected to occupied spaces and these walls need to be made more massive. In the two middle plans, the number of connected walls is reduced to two, and in the bottom plan, no walls are connected. In the middle plans, only one of the walls needs to be made more massive if the other wall is the exterior wall of the building.