CARA Material Database

The surfaces of room walls and furnishings (in CARA modelled by "3D Objects") may consist of different materials with different acoustic properties (sound absorption coefficients). These materials are stored in the CARA Material Database. They are referenced by unique Id numbers.
The CARA Materials Editor enables the user to define additional materials if their acoustic properties are known, and to include them in the CARA Material Database. At this, the Id numbers will be continuously incremented.

Updating the CARA Material Database

The CARA Material Database was expanded by some new materials (e.g. the materials of the FastAudio Absorber Elements). This new database is saved in the file CARAMAT.rfl. After downloading the file, copy it into the CARA main folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\ETSKIEL\CARA22P), thereby the original file CARAMAT.rfl will be overwritten.

ATTENTION:
If you had defined some additional materials earlier on, your entries will become deleted after updating the file CARAMAT.rfl. Therefore, these materials have to be re-entered in the new CARA Material Database by means of the CARA Materials Editor. However, this will assign these materials new Id numbers.
Therefore, you have to bring up all of your room designs which contain (some of) your customized materials in CARACAD (room design program module of CARA) one after the other and reassign your customized materials to the respective surfaces. Afterwards, you also should perform the acoustic calculations (program module CARACALC) once again.

However, if you want to save your customized material database for future use please read the following hints.