Machining and Fabrication Equipment in Workplaces

Increasingly well-developed workplace acoustic standards have resulted in more consistent outcomes across projects and normalized occupant expectations of acoustic quality, enhancing productivity and satisfaction. Yet these standards are often not developed for or applied to R&D and manufacturing spaces that include traditional workplace room types and uses; design criteria is limited to OSHA-assessment for noise-at-work violations. Hybrid office buildings incorporating prototyping and maker spaces are common today and often contain high-noise equipment traditionally found in dedicated machine shops. As these facilities are incorporated alongside traditional offices, noise and vibration levels generated by fabrication equipment should be accurately quantified to avoid compromised workplace acoustics. While sound data is available for most large construction equipment, available data for smaller fabrication machines typically found in machine shops is often non-standardized and difficult to obtain. Field measurement of existing equipment installations can ground an acoustical analysis with real-world data and be highly valuable in evaluating potential noise and vibration impacts and applying cost-effective mitigation during design. This case study will present measurements obtained during a noise and vibration assessment of an existing machine shop located within an office building. The discussion will include limitations of the data and an assessment of potential for disruptions.

BIM-based reverberation time analysis

Building Information Modeling (BIM) can store information of building elements and provide a computational platform for physical analyses for building systems. BIM can resolve several problems throughout various phases of design (as well as construction and operation). While use-cases such as daylight or energy analysis widely take advantage of this computational power, there is no integrated acoustical analysis tool or any external programs with acceptable interoperability within the BIM ecosystem. This study investigates the possibility of developing a BIM-based calculation method based on the most widely used design authoring tool in North America, i.e., Autodesk Revit, to estimate the acoustical properties of buildings with acceptable accuracy and details. A novel algorithm is designed to calculate reverberation time (RT), one of the most critical acoustic indicators of building spaces. The algorithm extracts geometric information from the BIM (i.e., the model); matches it with the physical properties provided by an open-source library; performs the analysis; visualizes the results on the model. The tool is tested over several case studies, and the results have been verified and validated using other existing methods. In the paper, we have studied the acoustical properties of an educational building using the designed tool under various scenarios.

Towards 3D printed saxophone mouthpiece personalization: Acoustical analysis of design variations

Saxophonists have different expectations from the saxophone mouthpiece, as it significantly affects the playability and the sound of the instrument. A mass personalization paradigm provides unique products to cater to their needs, using the flexibility of additive manufacturing. The lack of quantitative knowledge on mouthpiece design hinders the personalization attempts. This study aims to lay out how design parameters affect mouthpiece characteristics. Twenty-seven 3D-printed mouthpieces with varying design parameters are used in conjunction with an artificial blowing machine, to determine the acoustical relevance of the various mouthpiece designs on four selected mouthpiece features. The influence of the design parameters is evaluated statistically and via a case study with five saxophonists. The analysis shows that seven out of nine parameters tested affect the mouthpiece characteristics by relatively different amounts. A user study demonstrates that saxophonists confirm the results in 7 of 10 cases, and they prefer personalized mouthpieces in 4 of 5 cases. The results present a key contribution to the understanding of mouthpiece design. The findings provide valuable insights for new mouthpiece design and mouthpiece personalization.