Sound insulation design improvement for reducing noise of paper factory office

Abstract

Noise exposure in industrial building such us a paper production factory can be harmful for the employees whom are working in the outdoor area as well as in the offices. Some employees that are working in the open-plan office area in this factory layout are complaining about the noise produced by machines. The noise produced from the machines makes them hard to focus on their jobs. It is found that the closest noise source position from the office produces 79 dBA while the noise level of 54 dBA is present in the office. To deal with this situation, a noise mapping was done using Sound Level Meter (SLM) for measurement. The noise mapping can help for noise assessment to know the noise distribution in the factory that give an impact to office. The Transmission Loss (TL) of the office walls was evaluated by measuring the noise level spectrum inside and outside of the office, while T30 (reverberation time) values were also measured to obtain for room absorption assessment as it affects the TL values. These two parameters used to obtain the Sound Transmission Class (STC). It also enables to systematically predict the sound insulation improvement of the offices particularly as a basis to choose suitable material and wall construction. In this research, INSUL software is utilized to calculate the TL of the proposed wall design. The result shows that improvement of existing partition insulation using double glazing laminated glass and gypsum can meet the preferable noise level inside of the office that is 38 dBA using the new STC value of 23.