What the Tech: How do we perceive fan acoustics?

How we perceive noise depends on several factors. Noise percep­tion is subjec­tive and not easy to measure. Psychoa­coustics is based on exper­i­ments into this phenom­enon. For example, the fan of a heat pump conveys outside air from the house side to the inside of the heat pump.

This causes the air to vibrate. These vibra­tions can be perceived as sound for humans. The instal­la­tion condi­tions can also have a nega­tive impact on noise gener­a­tion. The theo­ret­ical values spec­i­fied in direc­tives and stan­dards cannot fully reflect human noise percep­tion. For this reason, it is neces­sary to conduct exper­i­ments with test subjects. These exper­i­ments have various config­u­ra­tions, the acoustics of which they then eval­uate subjec­tively.

There­fore, psychoa­coustic para­me­ters, such as loud­ness, sharp­ness, tone, rough­ness and fluc­tu­a­tion strength, can be used to obtain real­istic infor­ma­tion about noise percep­tion. The results are incor­po­rated into fan devel­op­ment and enable infor­ma­tion about which fans are best suited to the indi­vidual instal­la­tion condi­tions. There are many different compo­nents on the fan that can be opti­mized, with a massive influ­ence on both acoustics and effi­ciency.