3 Noise Control Principles for Manufacturing Facilities
Posted on: 13 July 2017
Are you planning to build a manufacturing facility? Read on and discover how the buildings can be designed so that the noise generated by your machinery doesn't have an adverse effect on your employees and those in the neighbouring buildings.
Sealing Dead Spaces
Sound can travel through any open spaces that exist within a building. These open spaces can be gaps that exist where electrical cables and HVAC pipes run through floors, ceilings and walls. One way to deal with this noise-transmission channel is by sealing those gaps so that no voids remain. This method is also the easiest to implement if you want to reduce the magnitude of noise transmission in an existing building.
Increase Mass
Sound energy can also be transmitted through vibrations. Construction materials with less mass will be more likely to vibrate and transmit sound waves when compared to building materials that have more mass. The dense materials dampen sounds because some of the sound energy is lost in the process of regenerating sound vibrations in different parts of the material through which the sound is attempting to travel. Building designers can therefore select dense construction materials so that your manufacturing plant will not transmit noise easily. Existing buildings can also utilise this sound attenuation method. For example, doors that are made from thicker pieces of timber can be installed in the place of the doors that were thinner.
Reduce the Vibratory Response
Increasing the mass of different building materials may not reduce noise transmission to the level that is desirable. In such a case, building designers may opt to select materials that have a lower propensity to vibrate. Such materials will dampen any sound that is generated by your machinery to the extent that employees may not need to use hearing protection devices when they are working inside the rooms that are adjacent to the rooms where the machinery was installed. Retrofit situations can also benefit from this approach. For example, thick carpeting can be installed underneath the machinery so that the carpets dampen the sound that is generated as the machinery vibrates.
Effective soundproofing should be a guiding principle during the design of every aspect of the industrial building if satisfactory results are to be registered. It is therefore better for you to get people who specialise in designing industrial civil structures so that a system-wide approach can be used. Only then will you avoid the often costly solutions that are implemented once a building has already been completed.
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