Avoiding impacts

[extracted from L108 "Controlling noise at work" p57-58]

Noise generated by impacts, including components falling into chutes, bins and hoppers, and impacts generated by tooling can be considerable. Try to reduce the speed and/or height of falling objects and avoid impacts, or make arrangements to cushion them, eg:

• fit buffers on stops and rubber or plastic surface coatings on chutes, to avoid
• metal-to-metal impacts;
• apply a progressive cutting edge to punch tooling on power presses to reduce
• the impact noise;
• use conveyor systems, designed to prevent the components being transported
• from impacting against each other.

Try to limit or reduce the 'drop heights' of components. For example, components which are produced by pressings and are ejected and then dropped into a collecting bin can cause high noise levels. Reducing the force of the impact can reduce the noise levels.