Noise Impact Assessment and Prediction in Mines
Using Soft Computing Techniques

Abstract

Mining of minerals necessitates use of heavy energy intensive machineries and equipment leading to miners to be exposed to high noise levels. Prolonged exposure of miners to the high levels of noise can cause noise induced hearing loss besides several non-auditory health effects. Hence, in order to improve the environmental condition in work place, it is of utmost importance to develop appropriate noise prediction model for ensuring the accurate status of noise levels from various surface mining machineries. The measurement of sound pressure level (SPL) using sound measuring devices is not accurate due to instrumental error, attenuation due to geometrical aberration, atmospheric attenuation etc. Some of the popular frequency dependent noise prediction models e.g. ISO 9613- 2, ENM, CONCAWE and non-frequency based noise prediction model e.g. VDI-2714
have been applied in mining and allied industries. These models are used to predict the machineries noise by considering all the attenuation factors. Amongst above mathematical models, VDI-2714 is simplest noise prediction model as it is independent from frequency domain. From literature review, it was found that VDI-2714 gives noise prediction in dB (A) not in 1/1 or 1/3 octave bands as compared to other prediction models e.g. ISO-9613-2, CONCAWE, OCMA, and ENM etc. Compared to VDI-2714 noise prediction model, frequency dependent models are mathematically complex to use. All the noise prediction models treat noise as a function of distance, sound power level (SWL), different forms of attenuations such as geometrical absorptions, barrier effects, ground topography, etc. Generally, these parameters are measured in the mines and best fitting models are applied to predict noise. Mathematical models are generally complex and cannot be implemented in real time systems. Additionally, they fail to predict the future parameters from current and past measurements. To overcome these limitations, in this work, soft-computing models have been used. It has been seen that noise prediction is a non-stationary process and soft-computing techniques have been tested for non-stationary time-series prediction for nearly two decades. Considering successful application of soft-computing models in complex engineering problems, in this thesis work, soft-computing system based noise prediction models were developed for predicting far field noise levels due to operation of specific set of mining machinery. Soft Computing models: Fuzzy Inference System (Mamdani and Takagi Sugeno Kang (T-S-K) fuzzy inference systems), MLP (multi layer perceptron or back propagation neural network), RBF (radial basis function) and Adaptive network-based fuzzy inference
systems (ANFIS) were used to predict the machinery noise in two opencast mines. The proposed soft-computing based noise prediction models were designed for both frequency and non-frequency based noise prediction models. After successful application of all proposed soft-computing models, comparitive studies were made considering Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) as the performance parameter. It was observed that proposed soft-computing models give good prediction results with accuracy. However, ANFIS model gives better noise prediction with better accuracy than other proposed
soft-computing models.