Work duties once called for me to stay overnight in a small room containing a variety of equipment, including three running PCs. I didn’t notice the noise while busy working among them, but when it came time to sleep, their combined disharmonious noises were maddening. Who knew that what felt by day like benign white noise could seem so loud at night!
The effects of noise are cumulative and can produce a surprising range of physiological and psychological impacts.
While it’s obvious that the sound produced by a high-decibel (150-160 dB) gunshot can at close proximity cause immediate damage to hearing (eardrums break at 160 dB), it’s not as obvious, but nevertheless equally true, that prolonged exposure to lower decibel levels can also cause hearing loss and other physiological effects. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set maximum permissible noise level exposures as follows:
- 8 hours per day at 85 dBA,
- 6 hours per day at 86 dBA,
- 4 hours per day at 88 dBA,
- 3 hours per day at 89 dBA,
- 2 hours per day at 90 dBA, etc.
From this is seen that what at face value might appear a rather small increase in noise level can result in a rather dramatic decrease in safe exposure duration per day.
Advantech’s Quiet Industrial Computers employ sophisticated strategies to reduce per-chassis noise levels to as low as 35 dBA, well below that critical 40-dBA threshold of distraction. Advantech’s Quiet Industrial Computer solutions come in 2 form factors, the 4U rackmount enclosure and compact size wallmount enclosure.