Maarten Hornikx new assistant professor in
Acoustics group TU/e unit BPS

02 - 01 - 2012

 Maarten Hornikx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
We welcome Ph.D. Maarten Hornikx who started working at the Laboratorium voor Akoestiek at Eindhoven University of Technology in 2012 as assistant professor in acoustics. He will follow up dr. ir. Heiko Martin who retired in December 2011. Hornikx main research area centres on the sound environment in the outdoor built environment (stedebouwfysica geluid). In the interest of the well-being of our citizens there is a need to provide good and comfortable acoustic climate outdoors. As a assistant professor, Hornikx will be working on applied and fundamental research projects on acoustics while initiating new projects. Besides that, he will be active at the university by giving lectures and supervising students.
 
Hornikx has studied the M.Sc. program of Architecture, Building and Planning in Eindhoven at TU/e. In 2004, he graduated after having chosen for the specialism of building physics. During his internship at the division of Applied Acoustics of the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 2002, Hornikx worked in the field of urban sound propagation. He became interested in that subject and continued in his Master's thesis project with the title 'modelling urban sound propagation in a moving medium'. The thesis work was partly carried out at the TNO Institute of applied physics. Hornikx has made his Ph.D studies at the division of Applied Acoustics at Chalmers, while spending the fall of 2007 to work at the University of Mississippi. He graduated in 2009 with the Ph.D. thesis ‘Numerical modelling of sound propagation to closed urban courtyards’. From 2009 to 2011, Hornikx has worked as a post-doc at KU Leuven in Belgium in the field of aeroacoustics on a Marie-Curie IEF grant. From last summer, he has again joined Chalmers as a senior researcher to work in EU funded projects projects Hosanna and Qside.

His scientific contributions can be synopsized into two branches. In the first, which is on the experimental side, Hornikx carried out an extensive acoustic experiment through a scale model study of parallel urban street canyons, in where he solved a variety of experimental acoustic problems related to sound propagation to urban courtyards on a 1 to 40 scale. The work led to new insights on the sound field in urban courtyards. The lead scientific Journal in the European Acousticians community, Acta Acustica united Acustica, has appreciated this work by giving it its triennial award on outstanding research results published in the Journal.

The second major achievement is on the numerical acoustics side. Hornikx initiated a method to model sound propagation in the built environment including all wave phenomena, the PSTD method. The method allows to solve problems where engineering approaches fail and the key aspect of the method is that it releases the computational burden of conventional methods with similar capabilities. The work has attracted collaborations with various research groups (National Center for Physical Acoustics in Oxford Mississippi, École Centrale in Lyon, University of Ghent and K.U. Leuven). Beside developing the PSTD code, Hornikx successfully applied it to real-life problems of urban noise abatement, sound scattering from trees and sound radiation from automotive exhausts. The method is still under further development and Hornikx will continue to work on this model at TU/e.























 

No main menu on top?
 Level Acoustics Homepage