Acoustic Room Dividers
Acoustic Portable Room Divider Range
Open spaces in offices and sectors including education, hospitality, and healthcare present a constant challenge in acoustics. While open spaces do lead themselves to a more free and collaborative environment; over-bustling office spaces can often hamper bottom-line productivity. At Portable Partitions, our advanced and stylishly designed acoustic portable room dividers help you effectively reduce the echo and absorb the sound. Use our partitions and experience intelligently crafted and functional spaces without any overhead costs or loss of productivity.
Choosing the right Room Divider
Choosing the right sound control furniture is key to achieving acoustic harmony in an office, classroom or venue.
Portable Partitions has multiple solutions that are created to suit all kinds of design and sound needs.
Grey 360 Portable Room Divider in Sydney classroom
When choosing the right partition you should consider:
- Size of the space or gap to be divided (length & height)
- Portable Room Divider or Operable Wall
- Fabric or Polycarbonate
- Folding or Sliding design
- Portable or Wall Mounted partition
- All room dividers can be opened and closed easily
Portable Room Divider or Operable Wall
- Portable Room dividers are freestanding, easy to move around and designed for flexibility.
- Operable walls are designed to divide big rooms when portable room dividers aren’t big enough and are fixed
to a wall on one end.
360 Portable Room Divider Product Video
Sliding Wall Mounted Operable Wall – Product Video
To decide between portable room dividers and operable walls at least 4 factors should be considered.
- Wall length requirements and size of the gap to be divided (length and height).
- Availability of nearby walls
- Flexibility of movement and use within the building.
- Materials needed.
Two connected Charcoal and Grey 360 Portable Room Divider in office
Portable Room Dividers:
These partitions don’t rely on existing walls for stability, they can be easily moved to different rooms in the building and are available in two very different materials: fabric and polycarbonate.
- Their height range is from 1.8m up to 2.3m in height.
- Their length range is from 2.6m up to 7.6m in length.
- Longer walls can be achieved by connecting together as much partitions as needed.
- Folding and sliding (telescoping) designs are available.
Operable Walls
Operable Walls are usually floor to ceiling height partitions with one end fixed to an existing wall for stability.
- Their height range is from 2.5m up to 3.7m.
- Their length range is from 2.3m up to 5.8m for folding design.
- Their length range is from 2.3m up to 4.6m for sliding design (telescoping).
Our design doesn’t require a structural beam or tracking system which helps reduce their cost by a huge factor when compared to traditional Operable Walls systems.
Tall sliding wall mounted operable wall
Fabric vs Polycarbonate – Making the right sound choice
- Polycarbonate room dividers are strong and easy to clean.
- Fabric room dividers reduce noise and have pinnable surfaces.
It is essential to know that soft furnishings like fabrics reduce sound reverberation to a great extent meanwhile
hard, reflective surfaces like polycarbonate do not absorb any sound.
Polycarbonate Room Dividers
Polycarbonate is a medical grade material that is recommended when visual separation is important, regular cleaning is expected and when translucency/transparency is not an issue.
Coloured polycarbonate makes it difficult to see through
Clear polycarbonate allows to see and let’s light through
Design considerations are:
- Coloured polycarbonate doesn’t allow shape details to be seen through unless heavily backlit
- Regular polycarbonate (clear) allows to see through to some degree (50% transparency).
- Coloured polycarbonate is available in black, grey and white.
- Room dividers can be manufactured with panels of one or any combination of available colours.
- The polycarbonate surface is not pinnable and will bounce most sound back instead of absorbing it.
Fabric Room Dividers
Have a 0.65 noise reduction coefficient (NRC) which means that 65% of sound waves are absorbed when they hit the divider. This allows them to effectively reduce reverberation and noise in general between the separated areas in a room. We, therefore, recommend that workstations and cubicles should be made from a soft acoustic panel to reduce the reverberation, rather than from pure glass, polycarbonate or perspex.
Red and Grey Fabric Room Dividers with White Board finish in Sydney office
Design considerations are:
- You can’t see through the fabric and light can’t come through.
- The pinnable surface allows the room divider to work as a pinboard for project or artwork display.
- Fabrics are available in beige, black, charcoal, cloud grey, navy blue, red and yellow.
- Room dividers can be manufactured with panels of one or any combination of colours.
Folding or Sliding Design (360 vs Straight Wall Room Dividers)
- Folding room dividers allow you to configure them in any shape or form, including a straight line.
- Sliding Room Dividers can only expand in a straight line by telescoping from the closed position.
Folding Polycarbonate Room Divider
If maximum set up flexibility is expected, a folding room divider with hinges that let every
panel rotate to any position is the best option.
If different shapes or configurations are not expected to be required now or in the future a sliding room divider will easily provide a straight line configuration.
Wall Mounted vs Portable (freestanding)
- Wall mounting a room divider helps it keep a fixed position within a room
- A portable room divider can be moved easily to different rooms and locations within the premises
Essentially our Wall Mounted Room Dividers are Portable Room Dividers that are wall mounted by fixing one of their end panels to a wall with L brackets.
Because they are essentially the same product they can be repurposed and moved to a different location as a portable partition if detached from the wall.
If the room divider may be used for multiple purposes then a portable room divider is a future proof option.
Benefits of Acoustic Partitioning
Open-plan offices are often implemented with the belief that they increase collaboration and teamwork. However,
compelling employees to work in the open impacts their health and productivity.
Increased Productivity
Access to smaller and quieter spaces for focused work is key to boost productivity.
As the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently mentioned: “The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together. But, crucially, it will also have plenty of private, quiet spaces as well”.
With office workers losing 86 minutes a day due to distractions! the opportunity cost of open working spaces without private workstations is high.
Polycarbonate 360 Room Divider in office space
Temporary meeting rooms with polycarbonate room dividers
Noise Reduction
Video calls, group discussions or chit chat can all get in the way of creating a healthy and productive environment where things get done.
Reducing and controlling the compounding sound that groups of people create in professional workplaces is one of the main benefits of acoustic partitioning.
Portable Partitions’s acoustic walls and dividers are designed to help manage and control the sound in offices, which thereby encourages collaboration and boosts productivity.
Maximise Flexibility
With workspace layout plans constantly changing, mobility and flexibility are the guiding principles for effective workspace management that is also future proof.
Flexible and mobile acoustic dividers that instantly adapt spaces can help maintain an optimum balance between collaboration and individual in focus as conditions change.
Polycarbonate 360 Room Divider in office space
Applications Of Acoustic Partitioning
Hampton park venue with fabric straightwall room dividers
Acoustics play an integral role in the success and functionality of a place. Acoustic room dividers and partitioning lend themselves to multiple applications.
Visual Separation
Room dividers help create smaller distraction free environments within a bigger space. They can act as a wall to create a completely new space or simple as visual separation to hide messy storage areas, or distracting equipment.
Sound Reduction
They can be used to effectively manage sounds within training sessions, meeting rooms, classrooms, presentation arenas or temporary office spaces. With the rise of video calls, sound dampening has become more relevant than ever.
Project Boards
Additionally, our Fabric room dividers work as multiuse walls that also double-up as collaborative project boards since they can easily be used to pin up material and customised with a ‘whiteboard finish.
Project work displayed on Room Divider at Sydney school classroom
Understanding Sound – Soundproofing vs Noise Reduction
As an overview
- Sound travels through air so if there are gaps or air circulation in a room, sound will travel there
- Some materials absorb sound whether some materials bounce back sound creating loud environments.
- Noise reduction consists in introducing sound absorbing materials in a room to dampen noise.
- A sound proof wall requires both an acoustically engineered material that doesn’t let sound through as well as sealing of any gaps that might let sound travel through.
Black Fabric Acoustic Portable Room Divider
At Portable Partitions Australia our acoustic room dividers work with the concept of noise reduction, absorbing 65% of the sound that hits the fabric surface of the divider. This opens the possibility to manage and reduce noise in a space, especially reverberation, chit chat, and echo by adding sound absorbing partitions.
As you may imagine, if a divider needs to move, creating a perfectly sealed mobile division is extremely hard to do no matter what material is used and completely soundproof divisions are best achieved by building a traditional wall (that can’t move). Soundproofing expectations and claims should be inspected carefully.
Conclusion
Some of the world’s most well-respected companies including the BBC, Facebook, Twitter, Virgin, and more have adopted the open-plan office design. While this can boost collaboration, balance and employee well-being remain essential.
Creating quiet and smaller spaces dedicated for focused work is what differentiates work environments that thrive.
RELATED CASE STUDIES
Best Ways to Improve Acoustics a Classroom or Office - Classrooms and offices have some unique acoustical challenges. Both of these environments must serve multiple… Read More
5 Ways to Improve Privacy in Open Plan Offices - It’s no secret that open plan offices don’t provide much privacy or quiet working space.… Read More