… for Construction Noise

Large construction projects are usually required to have a noise asssessment under section 61 of the Control of Pollution Act 1974.

NoiseMap is ideally suited to this work.

Noise limits are likely to be different for Core Hours, Weekends and Night. Night-time limits may also be different for Weekdays and Weekends, so all these scenarios need to be assessed.  Moreover, the activities on the site will change as the work progresses.  This means that you will need to assess the various times of day for each week or month of the project.  This could be a great deal of work, but NoiseMap has the tools to simplify it.

Each of the time periods is a separate scenario in NoiseMap.  The activities in each period is usually just a variation of the previous period.  This makes it simple to modify the activities in, say, Core Hours and save them as the Weekend Scenario.  It is then simple to further modify the Core Hours Scenario to give the Weekday Night Scenario, and to modify the Weekend Scenario and save it as the Weekend Night Scenario.

Firstly, obtain a list of all the activities planned for the site over the whole period of assessment – say over six months. The list should indicate for each activity the plant used, the location of the work, the time of day it will occur and over which weeks.

Put all these activities into the Core Hours scenario, and set the location and on-time of the activity – if it only occurs at night or weekends, the on-time will be zero.  Also give it a category number. (A category number is just an arbitrary number – we will see later how it is used.)

Now save the Core Hours Scenario as a new scenario – say Weekend.  In this new scenario, change the on-times of activities to represent the proportion of time they will be used at weekend. Perhaps many of them will be zero.

Repeat this for Night-time (maybe you will need weekday and weekend nights).

Categories and Combinations
Now you need to set up ‘Combinations’. This is a concept unique to NoiseMap, but it is incredibly powerful.  It enables you to get the total noise level for each of the time periods, and for each week of the project.

Each of the activities has been given a Category as previously described. In the above screenshot, Replacement of Glazing is Category 3. In Week 3, we know that two activities will be taking place – Category 3 (Replacement of Glazing), and Category 11 (Erection of Scaffolding).  To get the total noise level in Week 3, we just select the Categories (Activities) taking place in that week – in this example, Categories 3 and 11. Do this for each week (or month as needed) – just select the activities taking place at that time. NoiseMap will produce the noise contours and receiver results for each of these weeks, and for each of the scenarios, so you get the noise levels of all the time periods and all the weeks out of this single model.

You can output the results as a table that you can use in Excel or Word to produce the noise report. You can also produce cumulative noise contours for each of the time periods and for each of the activities too.