PhD in Acoustic Performance of Timber Structure Connections

About this position

Are you fascinated by improving the acoustic performance of timber buildings? Help develop advanced numerical models that predict sound transmission and bridge the gap between sustainable construction and high acoustic performance. Join this joint PhD project between TU/e and DTU!

Information

Buildings made from timber and other biobased materials generally have a significantly lower carbon footprint than conventional concrete or masonry constructions. However, lightweight timber structures often exhibit high variability in sound insulation, and poor acoustic performance remains a barrier to their wider adoption in the construction industry.

A still poorly understood source of this variability lies in the connections between structural components, such as screws, nails, steel brackets, and adhesive joints. Whether a floor is screwed or glued together, and how widely spaced the fasteners are, can significantly affect how sound travels through a building. Current prediction methods largely ignore these details, while more detailed models are often too computationally expensive for practical use.

Developing methods that are both physically accurate and computationally efficient is therefore the central challenge of this project.

We offer a PhD position (4-year contract) within the QUIET-ARC project, a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) as part of the EuroTech Universities PhD programme.

As a PhD candidate in the QUIET-ARC project, you will investigate how different connection types and layouts influence sound transmission in timber buildings, develop efficient numerical simulation methods to model these effects, and quantify the uncertainty introduced by construction variability into acoustic predictions.

Noise is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a major public health concern. By improving the predictive capability of computational models for timber buildings, this research supports more reliable prediction tools for sustainable constructions and contributes to the wider adoption of low-carbon building materials.

The project will take place under joint supervision of dr.ir. Cédric Van hoorickx (TU/e, specializing in numerical modelling of sound transmission) and dr.ir. Jonas Brunskog (DTU, with expertise in the acoustics of lightweight structures).

You will be based in the Building Acoustics research group ( https://building-acoustics.net/ ) in the Department of the Built Environment at TU/e, and will spend approximately six months at DTU’s Acoustic Technology group in Denmark.