| | JUNE 20228NOISE MITIGATION BECOMES A PRIORITY In an interaction with Industry Outlook, Chintan Athalye, Director, ARK Noise Control ­ India and Director, Athalye Group shares his views on the evolution of industrial noise control market.With increasing industrialization and rising manufacturing output, the industrial noise control market is expected to grow at a rapid pace. How do you see the current evolution of the industrial noise control market? What are the major factors contributing to its growth?The awareness of the industry for maintaining lower noise levels has significantly increased over the last decade. We have seen a significant rise in the number of enquiries received, for different types of machinery. This can be attributed to the government regulations all over the world becoming more stringent and enforceable by law. Nowadays, most project owners choose to maintain the overall noise levels below 85 dBA for most of the machinery that they purchase and put it as a non-negotiable criterion in their project specifications.A decade ago, this used to be a negotiable criterion and the noise mitigation treatment was generally avoided in order to reduce the overall cost of the project. Now this has significantly changed. More number of companies are opting to get certified according to OHSAS 18001, and are choosing to take care of their workforce when it comes to exposure to high noise levels every day at their work-environment. We expect the market size itself to grow by 20 percent year-on-year in the upcoming decade.What are the major challenges in maintaining suitable noise level in a manufacturing environment? How can those challenges be addressed?The major challenge is the awareness and understanding of the Project Owner (end customer) and their engineering team, about how sound works in a sound reflective field when there are multiple sources of noise in a particular room. This is primarily because `Acoustics' is not a topic that is covered in the syllabus in Mechanical Engineering undergraduate degrees (BE/B.Tech) beyond three or four pages in the entire four years. Due to this, the understanding of acoustics for most project owners is very limited.For example, if each individual equipment is `guaranteeing' 85 dBA of Noise level in `Free Field Conditions' and if there are five such equipment located in close proximity of one-another, then overall Noise Level measured inside INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
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