| | DECEMBER 20218NOISE 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% 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 (B.E. / B.Tech) beyond 3 or 4 pages in the entire 4 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 5 such equipment located in close proximity of one-another, then overall Noise Level measured inside that room (assuming brick walls on 4 sides, and Corrugated Roof sheets for ceiling) is likely to be in excess of 93~94 dBA. This increase is due to Noise Levels contributed by multiple sources getting added up logarithmically, and this noise level is amplified even further because of presence of sound-reflective surfaces in the room.To solve this problem, some basic level of analysis needs to be conducted of "Overall" noise level in the shop-floor as a result of collective noise generation because of possibly hundreds of machinery together, and accordingly designing the Noise Mitigation treatment for each individual source of noise. In most projects, this problem is highlighted only after it has already occurred, i.e., all equipment are already installed, commissioned & running.Absorption of low frequency sound in an effective manner is a challenge in noise control and architectural acoustics. How do you propose to solve this problem?Effective treatment of the doors, and providing Silencers for all cutouts made on the room is very critical for achieving overall lower noise levels outside the roomVANTAGE POINT
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