Noise investigation in manufacturing systems: An acoustic simulation and virtual reality enhanced method

Even though the noise issue in manufacturing is widely discussed from legal and health aspects, there is still no comprehensive method to simulate and analyze it. In this paper, a novel concept to investigate the noise level is proposed. Therefore a simulation method and the virtual reality (VR) implementation are involved. Acoustic measurements in real factory provide validation data for a realistic simulation. Furthermore, a representation of simulation results in the virtual environment is visualized in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). The analysis and evaluation of potential noise reduction are realized by using described methods.