Military and industrial performance: the critical role of noise controls

Abstract

Noise control is a well understood and important engineering skill. The science has been developed to address operational needs of being quiet on the one hand, and avoiding hearing loss on the other, both in industry and military operations. Noise control is also the first priority step in systems safety risk mitigation for noise hazards, as evidenced in U.S. industry by the requirement stated in Federal OSHA regulation 1910.95: “(b)(1) When employees are subjected to sound exceeding those listed in Table G-16, feasible administrative or engineering controls shall be utilized.” In actual practice, engineering controls are of first preference, while the second step is administrative noise controls, reducing noise exposures by removing personnel from high-noise environments. The third is the use of personal protective equipment (PPE), commonly known as earmuffs and earplugs. Each of these topics is discussed herein. The U.S. Navy has developed and/or implemented many groundbreaking noise control efforts on ships, and that provides the basis of discussion in this article. This article, as an overview of noise control, also addresses issues associated with high-noise environments and consideration of noise control techniques.

Keywords:

• Noise control
• noise modelling
• acoustic performance
• systems engineering

Acknowledgements

Portions of this work were performed under ONR Contract N00014-15-C-5058. The author would like to acknowledge the support of ONR for this work and also through an Inter-Agency Agreement, the support given by the Department of the Interior, BOR.

Disclosure statement

Mr. Komrower is an employee of Noise Control Engineering, LLC (NCE) who are the developers and currently sole suppliers of the DesignerNOISE^® acoustic modelling software. NCE generates revenue from the sale and support of this software.