Prediction and Evaluation of Emergency Broadcasting Sound and Speech Intelligibility for Safety Zones in High-rise Buildings

Abstract

As construction of high-rise buildings is increasing, the installation of a fire safety zone for the safe evacuation of residents has become mandatory. Even for building complexes with an underground connection between 30 and 49 stories, a fire safety zone must be installed when the residential density exceeds 1.5 people per square meter. In the fire safety zone, an automatic fire detection system and a system to assist radio communication must be installed. In addition, an emergency broadcasting system must be installed to announce the fire situation and to guide the safe evacuation of the residents. The fire safety zone was constructed with non-combustible material to minimize flames or smoke and was furnished to maintain a very low fire load. However, non-combustible materials have very low sound absorption characteristics; therefore, they usually reflect the sound energy into the spaces. In spaces consisting of sound reflective materials, the emergency broadcasting sounds reverberated, making it difficult to understand the meaning of the broadcasted sound. In this study, the room acoustics characteristics for fire safety zones in a high-rise building, represented as reverberation time and speech transmission index, were predicted using a certified room acoustics simulation method and evaluation of speech intelligibility. As a result of predicting the acoustic characteristics of the safety zone, it was found that the space had quite long reverberation and speech intelligibility was low, making it difficult to clearly transmit the emergency broadcast sound. When a safety zone was set up in a part of the machinery room, it was confirmed that it was difficult to clearly transmit the emergency broadcast sound, even when the background noise level was louder than 70 dB(A). To deliver a clear emergency broadcast sound in the safety zone, it is necessary to use inorganic sound-absorbing materials and to properly block noise in the machine room. In addition, it is necessary to establish guidelines for regulation of the speech transmission index for emergency broadcasting systems.