Acoustics ISSA Conference

Acoustics ISSA Conference

Auckland – August 29-31

Media advisory

Dr Felipe Gaitan is working on creating nuclear fusion using sound – doing away with all of the messy stuff that comes from splitting atoms to make nuclear energy – and he will be one of the keynote speakers at the International Sypmosium on Sustainability in Acoustics (ISSA) conference at the end of the month.

So too will Dr Trevor Nightingale, a Canadian expert in stopping sound transfer in light-weight (timber framed) buildings – think about the noise from the flat next door.

And while wind farms are hailed for producing green energy, they create often-passionate debate and are also claimed to be the source of acoustic diseases and the farms will be the subject of a collection of papers to be presented – and debated – at the conference.

The International Symposium on Sustainability in Acoustics will be held at the Aotea Centre, and keynote speakers can be made available for interview before and during the event.

The nuclear question – Dr Felipe Gaitan Instead of splitting atoms to produce nuclear energy (nuclear fission – the current method), Felipe is working on using sound energy to fuse atoms and get the same result – without the harmful by-products. The key to doing this is using high-intensity sound in a high-pressure device to create nuclear fusion. Sound is energy, and Felipe’s work is to use it to produce extreme heat, which in turn will fuse the atoms. This is the same process as happens in the Sun to produce energy. The question is whether Nuclear Fusion can be achieved… Dr Felipe Gaitan is an experimental physicist with a 25-year history in acoustic cavitation and cavitation physics. He was born in Colombia, attended universities in the Unites States, worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and now works for Impulse Devices to pursue his dream of producing “hot” fusion energy.

The noise next door – Dr Trevor Nightingale Timber buildings, especially houses and flats, are lightweight and relatively easy to build, but a major drawback is you can hear too much of what is happening next door. The key is design, and especially the design of where and how rooms and different floors connect to stop sound getting around – “flanking” – the partitions. Like New Zealand, Canada has a major forestry industry, which leads to a timber-based housing industry. Trevor is a world leader in lightweight timber acoustics and his aim is to produce designs that make a timber house “work” as well as a concrete one. Dr Trevor Nightingale is a world leader in his field. He is a senior research officer and group leader at the acoustics laboratory in the Institute for Research in Construction at the National Research Council of Canada. His research focuses on controlling airborne and impact noise in wood-framed multi-family construction.

Wind farms – Not in My Back Yard Wind farms are a great form of clean green energy – as long as they are not built “ in my back yard”. There have been several cases in New Zealand where community reaction has either stopped a proposed wind farm going ahead, or restricted it. Among the perceived problems are noise and health impacts, including sleep deprivation the inability to sleep or acoustic diseases. The ISSA conference includes papers from both sides of the debate, covering New Zealand standards, measurement of wind farm noise, and wind farms overseas. The papers will be presented at the conference with a period for discussion and questions afterwards, but the paper presenters themselves can be made available for interview.

Four other keynote speakers will be addressing the conference, and there will also be papers on noisy roads, recreational noise, noise exposure and hearing protection. Details of the speakers, the entire two-day programme, and the conference in general are available at www.issa.acoustics.ac.nz

The keynote presenters and other speakers can be made available for interview.

ENDS

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