Sustainable noise control system design for building ventilation systems

This article presents an integral approach to sustainable noise control system design for building ventilation systems in Hong Kong. This approach combines the analytic hierarchy process and life cycle analysis (LCA) to obtain a holistic view of the system performance in terms of human, economic, and environmental impacts. The approach was applied to the evaluation of various noise control systems including duct liners, silencers, semi-active noise control, and active noise control for ventilation systems. Although passive systems such as duct liners and silencers seem to consume more material resources than semi-active and active systems, the latter require sensors, controllers, resonators or loudspeakers, and electricity. In fact, the LCA showed little difference between the semi-active and active systems and the passive systems in term of resource depletion and carbon emission. As human impact and economic impact dominated the experts' views on sustainability, the analysed results indicated that the most sustainable design was duct liners, followed by silencers, active noise control, and semi-active noise control.